Explain Common Sense
Ken Ewell
or the common sense that all humans and most animals seem
to have but computers (obviously) do not?
The dictionary defines common sense as a noun meaning native
good judgment; the word _native_, in its use in this case as an
adjective, is taken to mean: raw, unprocessed, innate. One can
hardly add comment to the meaning of _good_ but for this
purpose let us suppose that it means safe, sure, genuine,
sound, and real. Now comes _judgment_ , and I dare say,
much has already been said on this subject. Again, for the
purposes of this discussion, let us suppose that it means:
The capacity to perceive, discern, and make decisions.
Let me suggest that common sense is the raw, real, capacity
to perceive, discern, and decide; that this should not be confused
with considered, logical, and reasoned, or otherwise _intelligent_,
deliberation itself. That place where humans begin to distinguish
themselves from most other natural animals.
The _judgment_ most animals and people exercise in their
daily affairs is usually not more than a rough estimate or guess;
based immediately, entirely, and totally, upon their _common sense_.
Accepting that experience accumulates to common sense; let us
distinguish this from intelligent or _reasoned judgment that, at
the least, consults other sources; allows, weighs, and measures
actions, testimony or evidence, according to personal experience,
social practice, custom, conventions, and according to recognized
conventions, rules and/or regulations.
Perhaps this is where most work in AI is aimed; towards working
out logical arguments and propositions; imposing rules and
rational that can be specifically and generally applied according
to defined cases and prescriptions. I submit that this has nothing
to do with that _capacity_ that all humans rely on in everyday life;
to recognize their circumstance, their ambient environment, and
realize their course; their _capacity_; the quality or ability to
absorb;
the power to perceive, discern and decide.
What is this capacity; quality, ability, or power; this common sense?
Ken Ewell
>The notion of commonsense receives particular attention in
>20th century philosophy. Work at Oxford and Cambridge
>in the early part of the century by G.E. Moore and Ludwig
>Wittgenstein in particular helped to establish what is
>sometimes known as "Ordinary Language Philosophy". In
>particular see G.E. Moore's "In Defence of Common Sense".
>This school of thought continues in later sophisticated
>forms via Norman Malcolm, Sydney Shoemaker, Carl Ginet,
>and David Lewis among others. Some scientific realists,
>such as Richard Boyd are friendly to ordinary language
>philosophy. Other philosophers borrow heavily from the
>ordinary language school without actually subscribing to
>it. A deep explanation of this area of philosophy is
>outside the scope of this note, but it might help to
>point out that Wittgenstein's "Private Language Argument"
>(which Kripke points out is not exactly an argument) from
>the _Philosophical Investigations_ plays a central role in
>commonsense philosophy.
I guess I am not interested in commonsense philosophy, I am interested
in common sense reality. A banal answer is sufficent and desired.
Bob Kovsky wrote:
>I consider Piaget's early works, Origins of Intelligence in
>Children and The Child's Construction of Reality to be absolute
>knock-outs. Also The Child's Conception of: Space, Time and (esp.)
>Movement and Speed (3 separate books).
I have seen these and some other works. Extensive as it is, he
describes everything in terms of intellectual development and does not
hint to what raw, unprocessed capacity, underlies the possibility of
this development.
David Longly wrote:
>I think you misundrstand what "natural assessments" are. These refer to
>sponataneous judgements which to all extents and purposes can be regarded
>as unconditional responses, ie reflexes. These are native ways of making
>sense of the world. That's why they are called "natural".
What I read there is all about the assessments themselves but not what
they are grounded in. I agree there are native ways of making sense
of the world. It should not take a treatise to describe them.
Thank you all, but I still am not making myself understood.
I am looking for an explanation of the _sense_ itself in common sense.
A banal and common explanation will suit me just fine. It is not
helpful, really, to point back to those whose works influenced the
present day state of affairs.
I suppose that the word sense in common sense would be interpreted as
a verb as in to become aware, to understand, to automatically detect.
I want to know what anyone here thinks this (apparantly instantaneous)
process is. What do we become aware of, what is automatically
detected?
If there is an assessment, what is it that is being assessed? What
came to mind or popped up or instituted the need for assessment?
Bob_Kovsky
between child psychologist Jean Piaget and a question, couched in the
forms of AI, as to what common sense is and how it relates to
"assessment" (which I read as meaning pretty much what Kant meant by
"judgment.")
In the second to last paragraph of the quoted material below, you
describe common sense as "to become aware, to understand, to automatically
detect." These seem to me to be three different things and all different
from common sense. The threesome seems to me to relate to input rather
than to computation. (Ha! How's that for putting a little English on the
metaphor.)
I follow Piaget in looking more to the concepts of biology than
to those of software engineering. After all, common sense is exercised
by animals, not computers. And common sense is not restricted to humans;
just look at domestic dogs and cats. Pretty crafty beasts, some of
them! Just tonight, I was meditating on the savviness of the cats that
lie on warm car hoods or under warm cars and how they figure out that
people entering the car means its time to leave.
Shakespeare wrote something like: "A man's reach should exceed
his grasp, else what's a heaven for." Now this can certainly be
explicated, (One's reach is what he can touch; one's grasp is what one can
wrap fingers around, etc.) It can also be referred to the abstract
meanings of "reach" and "grasp" as meaning reaching or grasping at goals
or power. The elaboration begins with the senses and muscular acts of the
human arm and extends from this root into more intellectual regions, but
it always remains rooted in the animal experience.
Piaget studied all of those forms of cognition that qualify
as "objective." Didn't care much for subjective stuff -- he was very
firmly established in the temperament of a scientist. Space, time
movement, muscular action, language, logical form, geometry, and the list
goes on and on. Equally, important, Piaget studied the co-ordination of
many of the forms.
Common sense is: the capacity that competent people have to use
each of these forms and to coordinate many of them to work together.
Moreover, there are general facts operative in reality that lead people to
end up, in many ways, with equivalent results from that coordination. The
forms, their coordination, and incorporation of the facts about reality
that are operative: together these constitute common sense. (I have yet
to hear a really common sense guide to investing; or rather, there are 20
that appear to have the same degree of common sense, and each clashes with
all the rest.)
In article <4hkq29$r...@huron.eel.ufl.edu>,
Bob_Kovsky
>> I follow Piaget in looking more to the concepts of biology than
>>to those of software engineering. After all, common sense is exercised
>>by animals, not computers. And common sense is not restricted to humans;
>>just look at domestic dogs and cats.
[Big deletion]
Mr. Ewell:
>...What are the
>principles, the basis, of this coordination or mapping, memory access,
>awareness, inference, induction, abstraction, natural assessment, or
>whatever you want to call it?
>
Me (previous article)
>> Piaget studied all of those forms of cognition that qualify
>>as "objective." ... Space, time
>>movement, muscular action, language, logical form, geometry, and the list
>>goes on and on. Equally, important, Piaget studied the co-ordination of
>>many of the forms.
Mr. Ewell:
>Piaget certainly shows the way, I can't recall though, that he had
>much to say about the co-ordination of the forms, other than they are
>coordinated somehow. As you seem to be very well versed, perhaps you
>could refresh my recollection of the aspects of co-ordination he
>covered.
And onward:
Piaget made detailed observations of his own three children for
several years, beginning when they were born. Report and analysis of
these observations for the first year plus were made in <The Origins of
the Intelligence of Children> (my translation does not have the date of
original publication, but I think it was 1931) His conclusions have
been confirmed (more or less, but more than less).
<Origins> identifies six phases of early infancy:
1. Reflexes
2. First Acquired Adaptations and Primary Circular Reactions
3. Secondary Circular Reactions and Procedures <to make> Sights Last
4. Coordination of the Secondary Schemata and ... Application to New ...
5. Tertiary Circular Reactions and Discovery of New Means ... Experiment
6. Invention of New Means Through Mental Combination
Phases 4, 5 and 6 all involve co-ordination, either in its
primitive form, or through adaptation and refinement, in discovery of new
means through experiment and invention of new means through mental
combination. These are "common sense" capacities
These are <all> sensori-motor phases. There is no language or verbal
mentation considered. Crying is significant as a signal and means of
controlling events (call for attention).
For an older child, further on the path of development, up to age 7 or 8,
look at the <The Child's Conception of Movement and Speed> (1946) (ah, the
joys of Switzerland!), especially the last chapter where Piaget sums up
his conclusions:
"...we were in fact led to distinguish six great
operational systems, operating ever more closely together, of which four
depend upon qualitative logic...
"1. Operations of 'placement' ... succession in space or of order...
"2. Operations of 'displacement' ..
"3. Operations of 'co-displacement,' i.e. correspondence between
placements or displacements...
"4. Operations of 'relative placements and co-displacements'
permitting composition of correlative movements and their speeds.
"5. Operations which are 'extensive,' i.e. mathematical ..., but
still not metrical...
"6. Finally metrical operations permitting measurement ..."
Piaget's list of matters considered includes many of
the important faculties of human experience that deal with objective
matters (about which people feel they must be in agreement).
I am suggesting that this collection of faculties makes up the
central basis of "common sense" and that whatever more needs to be
included can be included in similar form.
The faculties must be placed in their developmental context. Each (like
those participating in the motion operations listed above) begins as a
primitive, with a single way to do things or an extremely small and
limited repertoire. This single way or limited repertoire then adapts to
the conditions encountered and as facilitated by the physical apparatus
at its disposal so as to grow and diversify. Similar to the growth and
diversification of a species. (That's part of the biological approach.)
What makes "common sense" "common" (i.e. what engenders agreement among
competent persons of good faith) are the characteristics of the human
race we believe we all share and those matters in reality that (so we
believe) are "the same" for us all. And the beliefs in those
characteristics and matters in reality. The unities of experience we
expect to find in those with whom we associate, within boundaries of
varying definition and dimension, constitute an important social aspect
of common sense.
By the way, I have my own approach to some of the questions
raised in this newsgroup that is rather different from Piaget's (although
I rely heavily on his work). My main concern is freedom: the experience
of freedom in actual life and its relationship to a structural model I
have devised. The structural model necessarily involves something of a
metaphysical system, although one of a rather "wild" nature. I am
presenting my work in a web site, still at an early stage, but
probably more than you'll actually consume:
http://www.well.com/user/kumara
And now back to the program.
David Longley
mit...@readware.com "Ken Ewell" writes:
> Surely you do not assume that pyscologists or pilopsophers are the
> only people who are interested or have researched common sense?
>
No... but given the number and *person* hours which psychologists and
philosophers have put into this subject, it would be foolish not to
look to them first, if only to see what progress they have made. If I
want my car fixed, I don't ask the fishmonger...
--
David Longley
Ken Ewell
>In article <4hn2ou$e...@huron.eel.ufl.edu>
> mit...@readware.com "Ken Ewell" writes:
>> Common sense does not seem, to me, to be an issue of conditioning, or
>> of adapting, it seems to me that it is merely recognitive, an act of
>> attention..
>>
>It may not *seem* to be an issue of conditioning, but then again, this
>may just reflect a lack of comprehension on your part. If you are asking
>genuine questions you should be prepared to learn something *new*. If you
>already have some pre-conceived ideas about what the answr is within the
>the language of common sense (ie folk-psychology) I suggest that you are
>wasting your time.
It's just that I don't think machines have any psychological aspects
to them, so I perhaps I am biased in that I would not expect
psychology to provide most or all of the significant insight for
building a computational model of common sense that would be useful on
machines. I would expect however, for a computational model to have
consequence for the field of psychology. I mean for instance,
behavior and conditoning doesn't apply imo, adapting applies but in a
different way. There is something in psychology that may apply but I
did not note that you mentioned it.
Perhaps you could elaborate on what psychologists think _similarities_
are (in terms of memory or mechanical processes). What do you choose
to base a similarity on, what is the anchor, and how do psychologists
determine what is significant and what is not among a vast quantity of
possible significant ambient events or actions or lack thereof. Your
opinions are valuable, you seem well versed, I have read a lot of what
you posted..
There are other people in this news group that have valauble opinions
as well, maybe from something other than a psyshcological perspective.
I will not deny that I have some notion in mind while asking these
questions about common sense. I am struggling, really struggling,
though with how such a thing as common and commonly known and
(intuitively understood) as common sense can be explained. Who better
to address these question than the members of this news group?
>What I have pointed to is work in psychology over the past 40 years or
>so which is possibly the best, and probably the only account, you are
>going to get.
What about work in the field concerning archetypes? I did not really
see that in any of your postings. Are archetypes the province of
psychology or is that folk-psychology as you have called it?
>If the best research on the issue does not suffice, what more can be said?
David Longley
>
> It's just that I don't think machines have any psychological aspects
> to them, so I perhaps I am biased in that I would not expect
> psychology to provide most or all of the significant insight for
> building a computational model of common sense that would be useful on
> machines. I would expect however, for a computational model to have
> consequence for the field of psychology. I mean for instance,
> behavior and conditoning doesn't apply imo, adapting applies but in a
> different way. There is something in psychology that may apply but I
> did not note that you mentioned it.
>
> Perhaps you could elaborate on what psychologists think _similarities_
> are (in terms of memory or mechanical processes). What do you choose
> to base a similarity on...
I think this is the wrong way to think about these issues, if persisted
with it leads one to think in 'what is' terms rather than how things work.
'Similarity' has been studied in terms of stimulus and response generalisation,
ie the way in which animals respond to objects determines the degree to
which we class them as same or different. The problem is that this is, as
far as anyone knows an inductive process (something which Goodman wrote
about very influentially in the late 1940s with his concept of 'Grue'.
This is what philosophers call the problem of 'Natural Kinds'..
What I would urge you to consider is that we only have "psychological"
aspects to the extent that we do not know any better. What this leads
one to seriously consider is the notion of their being a continuum of
"physically (scientifically) understood relations" at one pole, and
"vaguely (psychologically) cobbled together superstitions" at the other.
Science progresses, IMHO, (by reclamation) from one pole to the other.
(see also Quine: 1990;1992; 'Pursuit of Truth' and 'From Stimulus to
Science' 1995).
The reason why machines, and (AI applications in general) do not have
psychological characteristics is *because* we have physically explicable
models of how they operate. To expect machines to have "psychological
aspects" therefore, is to expect the impossible.
The long article just posted in another thread reviews the basis of this
theme, and is extracted from a larger argument which has concrete
implications for the professional work of applied criminological
psychologists. cf.
'Fragments of Behaviour: The Extensional Stance'
http://www.uni-hamburg.de/~kriminol/TS/tskr.htm
--
David Longley
Richard Ottolini
and knowledge. Most A.I. experiments are very brittle when
they reach the boundaries of the tiny bit of human knowledge
they incorporate. Even the most simple human sentence may
refer to huge reams of underlying experience.
Luke Kaven
>Luke, I meant no disrespect to you or to the venerable Wittgentstein.
>Please accept my apology if you felt that my post was disrespectful.
I didn't think you were disrespectful. It took me years of
post-graduate study to grasp the point of some of these
issues. It is sometimes very difficult to convey the importance
of these arguments in a few lines to people outside of the field.
|My notion of common sense has no room for intellectual or
|philosophical rationalizations of any kind. This incudes notions of
|necessary and sufficient conditions for intellectual categorizations.
|This comes after common sense, I suspect, in that an individual's
|common sense sets up the framework for recognizing similarites,
|representativeness, and for associating, choosing, or otherwise
|deciding upon categories and classifications. Without the common
|sense to come out of the rain, as you wrote, what need would there be
|for rational agency?
Without a notion of rational agency, why would it be
"sensible" to come out of the rain at all?
|I don't want a definition for common sense, I have one, I am far more
|greedy than that; I want a full, clear, plain and complete disclosure;
|an easy to grasp explanation of common sense, what it consists of,
|what its principles are, and what capacity in humans and animals gives
|us common sense.
What is your definition? This seems to imply that you have an
interest in necessary and sufficient conditions. Otherwise you
must consider whether your definition is an infinite disjunct.
|You can explain the sense of hearing, as the capacity to hear, you can
|explain the sense sight as the capcity to see, of touch as the
|capacity to feel. Explain the common sense -- the capacity to what?
|To coordinate? How?
I know of no reason to assimilate common sense to one of the
sense modalities.
It does seem to me that your interest in commonsense is mainly
psychological and if you want to limit the scope of your inquiry
to that then that is your choice. Since this is a newsgroup
devoted to philosophy, I thought I would try to convey the
philosophical importance of the problem. I think you would
probably enjoy reading work by the psychologist Frank Keil
who I think is an important voice on the issue. And I know Frank
is integrative enough to point out a few of the philosophical wrinkles
in the matter.
As an aside to the rest of the group, I want to note that I am
deeply troubled by the extent to which people continually inveigh
against philosophy when they are mistaken about the role of philosophy
in the overall scheme of inquiry when they obviously do not have any
idea of what philosophy itself consists in! The most common mistake
seems to come from scientists who do not appreciate that
science does not admit to a scientific justification, but rather
to a philosophical justification.
Luke Kaven
David Longley
stg...@sugarland.unocal.COM "Richard Ottolini" writes:
I think you'll find that "human" knowledge and skills are very "brittle"
when taken out of their limited range of application. It is very context
specific. It may well be that we constrain ourselves in recognition of
this fact. There may be *diversity* in human skills, but for any one
individual we are pretty lost when out of our familiar environment <g>.
(See "Fragments" for recent reviews of limits of transfer of training,
the role of "neophobia" in behavioural constraint/plasticity).
--
David Longley
H. M. Hubey
>terms. I am looking for something in very human terms, i.e., terms we
>can all easily grasp and relate to.
Well, experts can be human. A physician is an expert. A geologist
is an expert. A loan officer is(may be) an expert. So just extend
the concept of expertise to programs.
And yes, defn of expert (according to a teacher of mine): is
a person who not only knows what he knows but also knows what
he doesn't know.
The second part is important. It cuts out people like Searle
who doesn't even know what he doesn't know.
--
Regards, Mark
Those who speak don't know. Those who know won't speak.
http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey hu...@pegasus.montclair.edu
David Longley
mit...@readware.com "Ken Ewell" writes:
> Thus, I am not asking for an explanation in computerese or in AI
> terms. I am looking for something in very human terms, i.e., terms we
> can all easily grasp and relate to.
>
If you want something familiar - don't ask questions - that way you can't
learn anything new/difficult to grasp...(unfamiliar).
--
David Longley
David Longley
mit...@readware.com "Ken Ewell" writes:
> Surely David, you are not suggesting that new knowledge must be
> unfamiliar and always expressed in unfamilair terms?
>
What I *am* saying is that "animals only learn when their expectations are
violated" (Rescorla & Wagner 1971) or whne they are "surprised" (Mackintosh
1975), and that this is *centrally* related to what you were referring to
when you were talking of 'recognition' and same/difference when processing
patterns.
I say that *very* carefully. Most of the work in learning theory from the
1940s on is really captured by a model developed by Rescorla and Wagner in
1971. It has been developed by others from a number of perspectives and
its basic notion is very much alive in Artificial Neural Network algorithms
(its a statistical linear/nonlinear regression model at heart just like
the Delta Rule). Alan Wagner expressed the surprisal notion in the language
of Short Term Memory priming back in 1979.
*Anything which you *learn* must be initially unfamiliar - else you would
be deemed as already knowing it - (ie it being familiar). This was the basis
of me getting rather excited 15 years ago over the finding that Naloxone
(Narcam) and opiate receptor antagonist markedly enhances neophobia (fear of
the unfamiliar). It does this VERY dramaticaly - and it does so by retarding
the decline of this natural, ie unconditioned behaviour in response to what
is unfamiliar.
The following was a 10 minute presentation with slides, covering
nearly 2 years work. Rules of the BPS dictate that authors must
be specified in alphabetical order, with the senior
author/presenter asterisked. The abstract is phrased as it is as
it was for a pharmacology audience. Reference to saline, is
isotonic saline, ie the vehicle which naloxone was dissolved in.
Further studies, delivered naloxone intra-cerebro-ventricularly
to confirm that it was a CNS phenomenon. As a behavioural
experiment, the results are very clear.
In the NIMR annual report, the work was summarised as indicating
that endogenous opioid peptides are involved in the processing of
novel stimuli. Rather than regard naloxone as 'enhancing'
neophobia it is better to take the complement of that notion and
say that it retards the decline of neophobia. That decline is, I
have argued, co-extensive with learning, or habit formation. The
pre-requisite to learning, or if you prefer, the constraint on
learning, is a variant of the UCR of neophobia. Opioids must be
initially OFF (theoretical elaboration on that point takes one
back to a neo-Hullian model of learning/habit formation).
I have not seen anything in the literature since this was first
reported, and by behavioural experiment standards, it is SEEMS a
dramatic effect. I *was* going to publish it as a major article,
and perhaps someday still will.
If there's anything wrong with the logic of what I have said above
please let me know...It *is* a very powerful behavioural and
phramacological finding in my view and tells us something very
useful about the basis of learning and, perhaps more interestingly,
the basis of our NOT learning!
J.F.W. DEAKIN & D.C. LONGLEY*
(introduced by T.J. Crow)
National Institute for Medical Research,
Mill Hill, London, NW7 1AA
Several studies report that naloxone, an opiate receptor
antagonist, reduces deprivation induced eating and drinking.
However, in the present study, naloxone (5mg/kg,i.p.) did not
reduce food intake of rats maintained on a 22 h deprivation - 2 h
feeding schedule. In contrast, naloxone (5 mg/kg,i.p.)
progressively reduced water intake in deprived animals to 46% of
saline treated controls. No effects of naloxone (1, 5 mg/kg) on
established bar pressing for food or water were observed with
either continuous or fixed ratio schedules of reinforcement.
However, naloxone (5mg/kg) accelerated extinction of responding
when food and water were no longer available.
Animals treated with naloxone (5mg/kg) during training of the
bar-pressing ate only 26% of the pellets delivered whereas
controls ate all pellets delivered. Since the animals had not
previously experienced the pellets or the operant apparatus, the
possibilities arose that naloxone effects were due to enhanced
neophobic effects of the novel food pellets or novel apparatus
cues, or were due to conditioned taste aversion. Therefore, food
novelty, apparatus novelty and timing of injections were
independently varied in different groups of 8-10 rats treated
with saline or naloxone. Rats were maintained at 85% body weight
with 12g lab chow per day. On experimental days 46 small pellets
(Cambden instruments) were placed on a small petri dish in the
home cage of some groups or released from a pellet dispenser in
an operant box for other groups. The dependent variable was the
number of pellets eaten over 15 minutes.
Naloxone (1,5 mg/kg i.p.) injected 5 or 20 min before test almost
completely suppressed pellet eating if the animals had not been
previously exposed to the pellets (p<0.01 't' test vs saline
groups). This occurred independently of whether tests were
carried out in the home cage or novel operant box. Naloxone
induced suppression of pellet eating was almost completely
abolished in either environment if animals had been exposed to
the pellets for the five preceding days in the same or different
environment. Naloxone (5mg/kg, i.p.) administered immediately
after pellet eating tests failed to suppress subsequent pellet
eating.
Thus, naloxone suppressed pellet eating if the pellets were novel
and if naloxone was administered before eating tests. The results
suggest naloxone enhances neophobic effects of novel foods and
that suppression of novel pellet eating is not due to enhanced
effects of novelty of apparatus cues or to conditioned taste
aversion.
Reference
FRENK, H & ROGERS G.H. (1979) The suppressant effects of naloxone
on food and water intake in the rat.
Behav. Neural. Biol, 26, 23-40.
PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH PHARMACOLGICAL SOCIETY (BPS)
1-3 April 1981
(Also British J Phramacology 1981)
--
David Longley
H. M. Hubey
>Knowing and certainty are, of course, epistimological, philosophical,
>social, political, psychological, physical, and informational issues
Ahem, what happened to "scientific" :-)..
>want another animal that has an independent will and I do not want any
>machine I employ to harbor any hidden desires or independent agenda.
That's not machine intelligence or artificial intelligence
as is more or less defined these days.
>I think it useful for people to air out their expectations for
>intelligent machines.
It has already been done:
Isaac Asimov has written the Laws of Robotics decades ago.
Perhaps some kind soul can find them someplace and post them
here.
Bob_Kovsky
I have a printout of Ken Ewell's most recent article on this
subject. Much material in his article is incorporated from prior posts
and Ken's new contributions are lengthy, so I will forego the
always-enjoyable style of "comments-on-comments" and just say some things
directly in response.
Piaget's book <Origins of Intelligence in Children> followed his own
children up to about age 14 months. A later book, <The Construction of
Reality in the Child> follows the Piaget children to about age 2 or a
little more. And later books carry the study of children (later, mostly
Swiss school children) through adolesence.
<Construction of Reality> and the later works touch on many of
the individual faculties that Ken mentions as being part of "common
sense," such as the faculty of knowing when a statement is subject to
being either true or false and knowing, in such a case, whether the
statement is true or false. (Ken's square-cube example)
I am not a Piaget expert and do not want to speculate about how
Piaget or one of his followers might answer your questions. The chief
chapter and section topics for <Construction of Reality> include "The
Development of Object Concept" (i.e. that things have existence
independent of our experience), development of spatial and temporal
structures like mathematical groups (Piaget was heavily influenced by
French mathematicians, such as Bourbaki, and consulted with some
intensively), "Development of Causality," and "transition from
sensorimotor intelligence to conceptual thought."
Clearly, Piaget addressed many of the matters you are inquiring
about. I suspect that someone (such as yourself) would have to read a
large number of the works (and there are 20 or so) and construct his own
synthesis about how Piaget would address the question of common sense. I'm
not sure he would acknowledge that the phrase can be stated with
sufficient exactitude for it to a proper subject of scientific discourse.
(And Piaget was thoroughly a scientist, with a traditionalist's affinity
for naive realism - "the world is just as I see" -- despite his own
subversion of such realism.)
Passing by Piaget and the children, let me respond on my own hook
to some other matters Ken raises. Ken says (well, here's a quote:)
"I want to 'know,' for certain and totally objectively, that
there are indeed aspects that are the same for all of us."
I respond:
Perhaps such knowledge is beyond our grasp. Perhaps our intellectual
activity incorporates systematic limitations and errors that infect all
of the images we have in experience. Hypothesizing so accounts for lots of
other phenomena, such as the inability of pundits to predict elections.
Under this hypothesis (which I call "the hairy hypothesis," meaning that
reality has inexhaustible resources of hairiness), the "mechanization and
computerization" you want is doomed from the start. Our knowledge
can comprehend all the machines and computers we build. The hypothesis
says that such knowledge is insufficient to comprehend reality. In my
website (http://www.well.com/user/kumara/), I identify a dozen or so
arguments in support of the hypothesis.
Science is structure. We have developed no structural system that
satisfactorily explains the phenomena loosely collected under
"common sense." Likewise for "consciousness" and "reality."
True principles of psychology and brain function also elude us.
Optical instruments sometimes incorporate "blind spots" where an image
cannot be maintained. Perhaps structural representations in experience
have similar areas of incoherence.
Ken Ewell
<snip>
> Clearly, Piaget addressed many of the matters you are inquiring
>about. I suspect that someone (such as yourself) would have to read a
>large number of the works (and there are 20 or so) and construct his own
>synthesis about how Piaget would address the question of common sense. I'm
>not sure he would acknowledge that the phrase can be stated with
>sufficient exactitude for it to a proper subject of scientific discourse.
>(And Piaget was thoroughly a scientist, with a traditionalist's affinity
>for naive realism - "the world is just as I see" -- despite his own
>subversion of such realism.)
Clearly relevant; maybe someone could point to a site where some or
all of Piaget's works may be electronically available.
Imagine what it might mean to philosophy if Plato had not invited his
friends to openly discuss and debate the subject. I wonder how Plato
would have taken to Internet news groups, and what his thoughts might
be on proper subjects of scientific discourse in the context of
considering and debating ideas.
I suspect that the world is just as we all individually perceive it to
be. There is my realism.
> Passing by Piaget and the children, let me respond on my own hook
>to some other matters Ken raises. Ken says (well, here's a quote:)
> "I want to 'know,' for certain and totally objectively, that
> there are indeed aspects that are the same for all of us."
>I respond:
>Perhaps such knowledge is beyond our grasp.
I trust that the knowledge is there; I would call it "natural"
knowledge, to distinguish it from "contrived" knowledge, and; I reckon
that such knowdege is necessary in order that we may experience
reality in the same ways in which we do. This knowledge in itself may
in some sense rightly be called common sense.
It is true that there are many who forsake reality for the sake of
experience. Yet, one can still suppose that human experience of
reality does not change the nature of reality, it is as it is. Our
experiences, though real, significant, and natural in themselves, can
only affect the ways in which we may experience the nature of reality
and those other natural and artificial entities that temporarally
share our proximate experience with us. To further stress the
difference, one could say that experience is mainly fleeting fancy;
reality, however, bears down on our experience, and our human nature,
and some call it "harsh reality," uncompromising, unforegiving, and
demanding.
Human experience may be likened to largely insignificant, contrary,
and peculiar phenomena, none-the-less, it is born out of the same
substance as the stuff of stars.
We have intrinsic knowledge of the fabric from which we are made, it
is in our anatomy, it is a large part of our existence, and it
permeates our every experience; one could say it is in the rythym of
our heartbeat; in our breath. More than this; we alone have the
reason and the capacity to openly express ideas about it.
We use it unselfconsciously in the normal course of conducting our
everyday affairs. Researchers, scientists, recognize it. Everyone
instinctively knows about it, clearly and plainly recognizes it,
although they may not discern it as the foundation that it is.
Despite our puny length of existence in the face of the age of the
Universe, we are natural phenomena; as much a part of the Universe as
are galaxies, stars, the planets, the earth, the plants, animals, the
signs from which we simth our words, and our conceptions of
astrophysics and quantum mechanics and all natural things in between;
subject always to the enveloping and encompassing existence of the
Universe in which we reside.
Nature's fabric envelops and permeates us. We feel it all around us,
in us, we revel within it, yet we do not really perceive it all. We
can look up and out on any clear day or night and rightly surmise that
we are inside it. We sometimes fail to acknowledge the significance
of the simple fact that we are here; we do exist in this Universe and
we are all in it together, no matter how independently we may
conceive, perceive, or experience it. No scientific debate, fact,
theory, or prediction, can ever change, nor barely challange the fact
of the matter. Perhaps this accounts for the idea that such knowledge
may be beyond our grasp.
>Perhaps our intellectual
>activity incorporates systematic limitations and errors that infect all
>of the images we have in experience. Hypothesizing so accounts for lots of
>other phenomena, such as the inability of pundits to predict elections.
I grant that our intellectual activity incorporates systematic
limitations and errors. Of this there can be no doubt. There is no
question that we simply ignore or fail to recognize most of what
occurs to the sensibilities. Selfishness, laziness, and desire limit
us. Deceit and conceit confine many minds; fear, disdain
discrimination, and idleness, many more. On top of all this, in these
modern and sophisticated times, we find much corrupt and profane
language where words rarely mean what they are supposed or intended to
mean; hardly suitable or reliable for signaling, denoting, and
conveying the natural ideas that they are supposed and intended to
convey.
The urge to censor or otherwise govern open debate, scientific or not,
is another such limitation. The limited, degrading, and puny nature
of many people's patient, let alone reasonably diligent, attention is
another limiting factor. All intentions to limit and disparage
understanding, unity, accord, and agreement are factors. Selfishness,
laziness, disinterest, and foolish pride are also factors. Subjecting
people to pedantic, autocratic, political, or religious, strictures is
another limiting factor.
>Under this hypothesis (which I call "the hairy hypothesis," meaning that
>reality has inexhaustible resources of hairiness), the "mechanization and
>computerization" you want is doomed from the start. Our knowledge
>can comprehend all the machines and computers we build. The hypothesis
>says that such knowledge is insufficient to comprehend reality. In my
>website (http://www.well.com/user/kumara/), I identify a dozen or so
>arguments in support of the hypothesis.
While I disagree with the statement that the computation of common
sense is doomed from the start, for what it may be worth, I found this
site thought-provoking and quite interesting in both form and content.
Much of reality is a mystery, I do not suppose that we must fully
comprehend all of reality, only those parts that are necessary and
sufficent for our purposes. I suppose, from reading those who came
before me, we need only comprehend its foundation, the principle(s) of
its underlying structure, some of which science already acknowledges.
I have little doubt that as we stand on reality's foundation and
realize its texture, we will find ourselves more capable of
recognizing the really real in its many wonderful, beautiful, and
terrible manifestations.
>Science is structure.
Science is structure, aggregated and carefully heaped onto
pre-existing structure; such are the intellectual errors in
recognition that lead to errors that, at the least, infect our
thinking. Long before the Greeks conceived of the science of
geometry, the Egyptians recognized and utilized geometry without any
Greek science to guide them.
>We have developed no structural system that
>satisfactorily explains the phenomena loosely collected under
>"common sense."
Is this a scientific conculsion? This would answer my original
request to explain common sense.
I do not suppose that we have to "develop" a satisfactory structural
system we merely need to recognize and dsicern the properties of the
structural system and principles that are naturally in place, and
pursue, of course, a satisfactoy explanation for that system.
>Likewise for "consciousness" and "reality."
>True principles of psychology and brain function also elude us.
Who would argue with this?
>Optical instruments sometimes incorporate "blind spots" where an image
>cannot be maintained.
Well, repeating a part of one of your suggestions:
>Perhaps our intellectual activity incorporates systematic limitations and
>errors that infect ...<snip>
some or many of the instruments and systems we have designed.
I believe that many social, educational, religious, and politcal
systems have had to be redesigned whenever new or more informed tenets
were declared in the past. We need only look to relatively recent
history to see the effects of adopting the view that the earth
revolved around the sun, which of course, it did, long before we
agreed about it. There are too many failures in hardware and software
technology, both products of intellectual activity, to pay homage to
the best exemplars of the imposed limitations and errors that infect
them. We should expect redesign commensurate with increases in
information; some of which, sometimes, eliminates blind spots.
>Perhaps structural representations in experience
>have similar areas of incoherence.
I would expect this; unless people live extremely closely and exist in
a loving relationship of unconditional faith and fidelity, there are
bound to be areas of incoherence in the structural representations of
their experience of reality. Incoherence is a lack of order and/or
connection; sometimes, merely a lack of information.
Most people do not live in high-fidelity relationships. They are much
farther apart, socially, culturally, physically and psychologically,
and as a result, very little fidelity exists within nations and even
within families; thus we have pockets and feelings of incoherence.
One promise, perhaps unspoken, of the globalization of information
networks is that we may come closer togther; if only philosophically
and/or psychologically, reducing pockets and feelings of incoherence
by filling them with information.
I do not substitute experience for reality or vice-versa; they are
each clearly and distinctly different to me. We do not share
experiences. I would not wish it on anyone to have had to share some
of the experiences I have indulged in or those I have been subjected
to; we do, however, share the reality of our existence.
We can only share in the expressive knowledge of individual
experiences, not in the experiences themselves. And that small part
that we do share is due in no small measure to the shared and common
reality in which we exist, and with which we communicate, convey, and
consider the ideas that these words represent.
Luke Kaven
>In article <4hsfug$l...@huron.eel.ufl.edu>
> mit...@readware.com "Ken Ewell" writes:
>> Thus, I am not asking for an explanation in computerese or in AI
>> terms. I am looking for something in very human terms, i.e., terms we
>> can all easily grasp and relate to.
>>
>If you want something familiar - don't ask questions - that way you can't
>learn anything new/difficult to grasp...(unfamiliar).
>--
>David Longley
I should mention the importance of ordinary language philosophy
again here. Also agreed that Ken is looking for something he has
in mind already, which isn't unintelligent. But I think he would
have something to gain from accepting advice.
Luke
Peter_...@uk.ibm.com
>What I would urge you to consider is that we only have "psychological"
>aspects to the extent that we do not know any better.
This is question-begging. If I had an account in neural terms of someone's
behaviour, which only a computer could ever use to predict from (typically
humans are very bad following endless rules blingly), I don't see why such
an account should be a reason for eliminating 'psychological aspects'.
Indeed, it might be that such an account could be understood in different
ways than the purely causal, in which case it could *support* the
psychological account. Indeed, I have been arguing that parsimony is
significant in neural processing (and this is significant for common
sense) and, if so, this could well *justify* (and not eliminate) the account
of humans (and animals) in psychological terms.
The weakness in the argument that knowledge drives out psychological
accounts is this: a causal (or physical law) account depends on the initial
conditions. But if those initial conditions are so set up as to provide an
alternative account, and if we can also argue that the inital conditions
are set up *so as to implement* the alternative account, the causal (or
physical law) account does not eliminate the other. Rather, the causal
(or physical law) account then acts as a *justification* of the other
account (in this case the psychological account).
This is a possibility that Longley is blind to and his remark above
just begged the question.
Cheers,
Pete Lupton
Bob_Kovsky
Typo in Jean Piaget Society website address. Should be:
http://vanbc.wimsey.com/~chrisl/JPS/JPS.html
Sorry.
Ken Ewell
>mit...@readware.com (Ken Ewell) writes:
>>Knowing and certainty are, of course, epistimological, philosophical,
>>social, political, psychological, physical, and informational issues
>Ahem, what happened to "scientific" :-)..
I surmise that you are making a comment as to a supposed fact that
knowing and certaintly are scientific issues. They are of course, and
I mentioned a few scientific fields. Of course they are personal
issues too and not necessarily sought aftre by using sceintifc method.
E.g., You say you love me, how do I know that you do?
I posted eariler:
>>want another animal that has an independent will and I do not want any
>>machine I employ to harbor any hidden desires or independent agenda.
You replied:
>That's not machine intelligence or artificial intelligence
>as is more or less defined these days.
I was really only airing my personal expectation and did not intend
the statement to define the state of AI these days.
Who was it that said:
Never underestimate the ability of people to
develop strange interpretations of anything
you write, say, or do.
Is this ability a function of someone's common sense or of one's
psyche?
Perhaps, if you are willing take the trouble, you could briefly and
plainly tell us what the discussions (in this and other newsgroups)
about free will and freedom of choice have to do with producing
intelligent machines.
Me:
>>I think it useful for people to air out their expectations for
>>intelligent machines.
>It has already been done:
I cannot see anything in my above statement that would lead anyone to
suppose that I intended to assert that this had not already been done.
I was merely stating _my_ thoughts about _my_ own digression to state
_my_ personal expectations. If this is not allowed, I hope that
everyone will accept my apology, and I will see to it that I gauge my
statements more appropriately in the future.
>Isaac Asimov has written the Laws of Robotics decades ago.
Shall we suppose that nothing has changed?
David Longley
hu...@pegasus.montclair.edu "H. M. Hubey" writes:
> David Longley <Da...@longley.demon.co.uk> writes:
>
> >What I *am* saying is that "animals only learn when their expectations are
> >violated" (Rescorla & Wagner 1971) or whne they are "surprised" (Mackintosh
> >1975), and that this is *centrally* related to what you were referring to
> >when you were talking of 'recognition' and same/difference when processing
> >patterns.
Well, here's how I started to conjecture about this in the early 1980s.
First of all, if we accept a Hullian drive reduction approach to behaviour,
many of the behaviours we traditionally class as appetitive, such as feeding
must be regarded instead as escape/avoidance behaviours.
Most of the literature treats "food" as an appetitive UCS, but a careful
analysis shows that this is wrong (see Pavlov's "Conditioned Reflexes" intro
where he provides examples of conditioning). This shows "food" to be a CS
compound, and most feeding must therefore be seen as behaviour addresed
to the escape from or the avoidance of hunger. One can look at all behaviour
this way.
if this is so, approach and withdrawal behavour is really the same. What
makes it look different is the relative source of the UCS which is always
an aversive state.
The work I cited on nalxone is supposed to suggest that endogenous opioid
peptides, present in all the primary sensory nuclei of the CNS, play a role
in what Pavlov called "Protective Inhibition" or what Hull called
"Transmarginal Inhibition of Intensity". This is a protective response
triggered by intense stimulation, which animals are unconditionally
programmed to minimize. All of the behaviour elicited or emitted is done
so just to mitigate surprise, and if successful becomes conditional
avoidance behaviour of greater and greater complexity and elaboration
as "predictions" of progressively larger conjunctions (cf Popper 1963;
Rescorla and Wagner 1971; Quine 1990;1002;1995).
--
David Longley
Chad Loder
>
>
One notes the importance of critical mass in all sorts of phenomena.
A little noted one is, for example, that firms were once vertically
integrated:Henry Ford smelted his own steel, Japanese car firms educated
their own workers. Society reaches a critical level of complexity,
however, then steel, educated people and complex intermediate goods and
services in a value chain become commodities, freely available, and
firms "de-integrate", define core competences and specialise in doing on
thing very well. Hence - amongst other things - the wave of
restructuring and job insecurity.
>
>
Hey...that sounds remarkably like the move from non to object-oriented
programming.
-chad
--
Chad Loder
Biological Knowledge Laboratory
College of Computer Science
Northeastern University
Boston, MA 02115
(617) 373-6613
EMail: mailto:clo...@ccs.neu.edu
Page : http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/cloder
Ken Ewell
<....snip>
>Knowledge also reaches critical masses. Virtually all knowledge has to be
>represented in on of two forms: as an appeal to existing knowledge structures
>(captured in the aphorism that "all our models are made of models") or it
>brings with it certain innate properties that define its nature within the system:
<snip>
Well stated. Could common sense be the common sense that all our
models (for reality) are based on natural models; all appealing to
(knowledge) structures already in the human imagination, innately
and/or through learned experience.
For example: Could it be that the nature of the aroma of a rose is
structurally apparanent to our perception from past experiences of
aromas and the particular aroma of a rose? Is this how we can
recognize a rose when we smell one?
As an aside to David Longley, it is an accepted principle of learning
that it is initiated at the onset of the unfamiliar. When someone
encounters a rose for the first time, the aroma of the rose becomes
known to them. The mere exposure causes the one exposed to learn
something. Whether one reocginzies the aroma of a rose in the future,
or not, depends on what?
<....snip>
> Concentrating on the first of these, chains of models that appeal to
>each other, are self-referential and in other ways act as structures of interpretation
>can be very bare or very embedded into the system. The embedding can be
>more or less coherent and integrated. A system that is highly complex and well
>integrated displays 'common sense', ....
<snip>
Well, I cannot imagine why it must be highly complex, but well
integrated, certainly makes a lot of sense; nor can I understand what
you mean by contrasting the structure(s) of interpretation as 'very
bare' or 'very embedded.' Is it possible that they are both bare, if
I take bare to mean "minimal," and embedded?
Still, this begs the question what are some, any, or all, of the
coherent, innate, and integrated structural porperties? How are the
coherently integrated?
<....snip>
>We observe this in others
>and feel it in ourselves as a reflexive unity - that this maps to that with no loose
>edges or inner caveats, the symptoms of unresolved subsystems which pull in
>or excite some other vectors in decision space.
All very plainly said, thank you Oliver. Could you rephase this with
your thoughts on how you suppose the "vectors" might be construed, and
what might constitute the decision space, in more objective terms?
Ken Ewell
>What I *am* saying is that "animals only learn when their expectations are
>violated" (Rescorla & Wagner 1971) or whne they are "surprised" (Mackintosh
>1975), and that this is *centrally* related to what you were referring to
>when you were talking of 'recognition' and same/difference when processing
>patterns.
<snip>
I have no arguement here and totally accept this. It is an accepted
tenet that we learn about things that are unfamiliar to us.
When I asked for an explanation in terms we can all easily grasp and
relate to, I was not referring to any unfamilar ideas in your replies.
I was referring to the following reply posted by H. M. Hubey.
>Common sense, in computerese (especially AI), is a collection
>of a huge number of expert systems (but each one not too
>expert) all seamlessly integrated together to function
>as a unit (such as an average person who is not superb at
>anything--i.e a real expert-- particular but reasonably good
>at almost everything).
>> >In article <4hsfug$l...@huron.eel.ufl.edu>
>> > mit...@readware.com "Ken Ewell" writes:
>>
>> >> Thus, I am not asking for an explanation in computerese or in AI
>> >> terms. I am looking for something in very human terms, i.e., terms we
>> >> can all easily grasp and relate to.
>> >>
>> David Longley <Da...@longley.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>>
>> >If you want something familiar - don't ask questions - that way you can't
>> >learn anything new/difficult to grasp...(unfamiliar).
>>
I replied:
>> Surely David, you are not suggesting that new knowledge must be
>> unfamiliar and always expressed in unfamilair terms?
>>
I stand corrected: Something new is undoubtedly something unfamiliar,
though not necessarily difficult to grasp.
But I also expect that any knowledgeable expert, if they know for
certain, can explain what they know, in common and ordinary language,
and without resorting to technically complex and obscure language,
polemics, pure citation, or tactics of intimidation, belitllement,
fear, or confusion.
David, I cannot tell from some of your replies, when you are talking
about behavior in the sense of the human psyche and when you are
talking about natural behavior that is a part and parcel of nature
herself. I am confused by many of your statements, perhaps others are
not, perhaps it is just me. I will review.
For the record, anything having to do with the ways in which nature
communicates, and/or the natural signals that are sensed by humans, I
am highly interested in, and anything having to do with the
unpredictable, indeterminate, and self-centered, human psyche, I am
excluding from my quest. Can you separate the two?
Let me suggest that a part of common sense may be our ability to sense
the "common" in what is going on in and around us. I think the
commonality that we sense is re-presented (if you will allow) to the
imagination by the sensibilites, and I suppose, as David pointed out,
that we can recognize (right away) when something is not common with
the previously learned and/or existing (partial or innate) models
(images, imaginings) that we have in mind. This effect, draws out, I
surmise, not only our behavioral surprise, but the attention and
resolve of our psyche, spurned on no doubt, by neurological processes
(and our love/fear of behavioral science. ;-)>)
Granted, and this is David's domain apparantly, that the brain/body
manufactures chemical and/or electro-magnetic impluses and signals to
envelope all of this; programmable machines and binary logic states,
though, do not work in this way. Connectionists techniques have
proven sound for the propagation of signals necessary to such models.
Perhaps I have not been as plain and clear as I supposed I had. Let
me try to be perfectly clear:
I conceive of "common sense" as a perceptive or an imaginative
process. I believe the behavorial aspects of these processes are
irrelevant to devising a computational model, largely because I do not
expect machines to behave like humans even if they mirror some
sensible human capacities and abilities. I may be wrong, but that is
inconsequential at this stage.
I believe common sense is partly something we rely on in order to
behave in the ways we do; this however, is irrelevant to the ways that
the computer program I have in mind may use or rely on common sense,
if it were available as a computational store and/or process.
If the perspective is unfamiliar to you as a behavioral psychologist,
I understand this, David. Perhaps it is of little interest to you and
you may not know what I am looking for in this context, or; if it is
so unfamiliar as to be interesting, the shoe may fit the other foot,
and you may add to your considerable and learned knowledge, or learn
something new yourself, by continuing to contribute to and follow
this, apparently banal, discussion.
I believe nature reveals herself (or the world reveals itself) through
her (its) essential forms that are discerned and denoted _to_ human
imaginations (or to the mind or psyche if you prefer) _by_ the
sensibilites. Or, if you prefer, the more tritely and slightly
modified 'what you perceive is what you get.' Still, what is the
structure of the necessary forms?
I think that people can easily recoginze and manipulate these forms
(via their perception(s) and conception(s); via their sensibilites) in
their imaginations. I think any arguement over which are
representations, and which are visual images, irrelevant and
distracting; there is a feature or features common to any of these
forms. I can perceive of 'learning' as a process of recognition,
algining the necessary forms and bringing them into logical and
physical accord. I think a lot can be gained by devising and
developing a computational model along these lines.
This is a broad and general belief and perhaps pretty irregular
thoughts I grant. None-the-less, I believe I am of sound mind, that I
am capable of seeing things the way they really are, instead of only
the way I would like them to be, or the way some authority tells me
they are. I am not mentally de-ranged, have no psychological problems,
take no medications, and I enjoy a peaceful co-existence with my wife
and children, within my community, and with all those around me. I am
not troubled in any way. I have a high enough IQ and a fair amount of
real-life experience to attempt to figure these things out for myself.
I have spent a fairly long time surveying and investigating the field,
so I do not consider myself naive, albeit, to be competely honest, my
wife admits to often thinking of me as her little boy.
So, to sum up, I see nothing wrong with the perspective that I have
adopted. I am trying to "see" though the whole thing which I
admittedly fail to comprehend well enough. In this way, I consider
my thoughts about the subject to be valid. If I am wrong feel free to
tell me so, but I do not think it appropriate for men of good
conscious and honest intentions to attempt to derail or belittle
someone or someview simply to establish or repeat another point of
view or set of convictions.
I have my system in mind. I have said this. This does not mean I
have nothing to learn. I have everything to learn. But I do not
think it helps to cite the work of others, their words, or their
findings, particularly when the topic itself cannot be satisfactorily
explained by them. Now, if you offer an explanation and cite research
to support your thus stated understanding, this is another matter.
It would be more useful to use your own words to plainly explain the
technical and theoretical implications of their findings as it relates
to the perspective I have outlined. I must note that there are those
in this usenet newsgroup that do use their own words to explain some
possibly significant considerations, and none of this applies to them
(every one knows who they are.)
You will find me unwavering in my convictions, steadfast and
persistent, if otherwise dense, stupid, and/or otherwise lacking
sufficient worldliness or sophistication, these are the qualities my
wife admires in me. So if you suppose that there is nothing to be
gained, then; let me implore you, if you please, to state clearly why
you think there is nothing to be gained through this line of thinking.
I suppose only that it is possible to discern and compute the common
structure(s) of the essential forms of nature if only we could
comprehend and understand what structure(s) these forms held in
common. I do not think this unreasonable nor impossible. Real or
imagined forms may be described mathematically, the relations between
real or imagined forms may be computable. Forms of things, I suppose,
are what are imagined by the sensibilities.
What I am after is the formal structure (as in, or pertaining to, the
essential form of something: "a formal principle.") of the
commonalities in signals and signs from nature that we readily and
easily sense, and perceive, even if only paritially comprehend. How
are things so sensed and perceived by the imagination, that we can
easily dscern something out of the oridinary; something that surprises
us, violates our expectations; what common pattern(s) do forms of
nature share? (This last part may not be so plain or clear and
perhaps it could be phrased more clearly by someone else.)
Ken Ewell
David Longley
mit...@readware.com "Ken Ewell" writes:
>
> But I also expect that any knowledgeable expert, if they know for
> certain, can explain what they know, in common and ordinary language,
> and without resorting to technically complex and obscure language,
> polemics, pure citation, or tactics of intimidation, belitllement,
> fear, or confusion.
I think this is just *wrong*.
You will have noticed my frequent references to Quine. I urge you to give
some thought to how radical his proposal is that "translation" is *not*
what we often take it to be. Put simply, it is rare to be able to put
technical points in non-technical terms for the same reason that it is
rare to be able to literally translate from one language to another
without losing a lot on the way. Put even more directly, the reason
*why* technical language is created in the first place is *because*
ordinary language is inadequete. The language of mathematics, logic
and science is less ambiguous, ie more rigidly structured than ordinary
language.
If the work *could* be expressed in common and ordinary language, they
would have done so in the first place <g>.
>
> David, I cannot tell from some of your replies, when you are talking
> about behavior in the sense of the human psyche and when you are
> talking about natural behavior that is a part and parcel of nature
> herself. I am confused by many of your statements, perhaps others are
> not, perhaps it is just me. I will review.
>
> For the record, anything having to do with the ways in which nature
> communicates, and/or the natural signals that are sensed by humans, I
> am highly interested in, and anything having to do with the
> unpredictable, indeterminate, and self-centered, human psyche, I am
> excluding from my quest. Can you separate the two?
One approach here has been to look at the linguistic "terms" we use. My
reference to idioms of propositional attitude as intensional, in contrast
to the language of science which aspires to be extensional, is one way
of trying to make a viable partition.
>
> Let me suggest that a part of common sense may be our ability to sense
> the "common" in what is going on in and around us. I think the
> commonality that we sense is re-presented (if you will allow) to the
> imagination by the sensibilites, and I suppose, as David pointed out,
> that we can recognize (right away) when something is not common with
> the previously learned and/or existing (partial or innate) models
> (images, imaginings) that we have in mind. This effect, draws out, I
> surmise, not only our behavioral surprise, but the attention and
> resolve of our psyche, spurned on no doubt, by neurological processes
> (and our love/fear of behavioral science. ;-)>)
There is an explicit attempt amongst contemporary learning theorists not
to use sueprise, attention etc in the familiar sense because doing so
drags in a lot of other mentalistic baggage. What is "common" may be a
load of prejudiced nonsense. Just because we share a proclivity to
jump to conslusions and generalise from limited samples, does not make
it right. If you look at the distribution of IQ, or the way in which we
"value" skills of any sort, you will notice that we do so as a function
of scarcity, not commonality.
There's no end of fanciful theoretical notions one can throw together
with a pich of technical knowledge and a lot of creative thinking and
writing, but without the discipline of logic and empirical observation
and analysis, such behavour is no more than art.
>
> Granted, and this is David's domain apparantly, that the brain/body
> manufactures chemical and/or electro-magnetic impluses and signals to
> envelope all of this; programmable machines and binary logic states,
> though, do not work in this way. Connectionists techniques have
> proven sound for the propagation of signals necessary to such models.
>
Connectionist models *do* work that way. They run on computers. However,
they work by extracting common features as weight matrices and classify
on the basis of a limited sample. Once you start looking at *what* the
weights are, and looking at the charactteristics of the construction
sample, and look for validation samples etc, you are moving back into
the domain of extensional analysis, as explicit statisical regression,
with all its assumptions as caveats.
> Perhaps I have not been as plain and clear as I supposed I had. Let
> me try to be perfectly clear:
>
> I conceive of "common sense" as a perceptive or an imaginative
> process. I believe the behavorial aspects of these processes are
> irrelevant to devising a computational model, largely because I do not
> expect machines to behave like humans even if they mirror some
> sensible human capacities and abilities. I may be wrong, but that is
> inconsequential at this stage.
The ways in which we think initially must be based on the way of physiology
and anatomy is instructed to develop by our DNA. So in a way, you could
say that what you are calling "common sense" here and in your next paragraph
amounts to our unlearned behaviour, and our learned but unvalidated behaviour.
My point is that such "commmon sense" differs from what we really "value".
We enrust our lives not to common sense but to the technical skills of
experts (doctors, lawyers, dentists, accountants, firemen, you name it).
>
> I believe common sense is partly something we rely on in order to
> behave in the ways we do; this however, is irrelevant to the ways that
> the computer program I have in mind may use or rely on common sense,
> if it were available as a computational store and/or process.
>
See above.
> If the perspective is unfamiliar to you as a behavioral psychologist,
> I understand this, David. Perhaps it is of little interest to you and
> you may not know what I am looking for in this context, or; if it is
> so unfamiliar as to be interesting, the shoe may fit the other foot,
> and you may add to your considerable and learned knowledge, or learn
> something new yourself, by continuing to contribute to and follow
> this, apparently banal, discussion.
>
It's not *unfamiliar* - it just doesn't help to even think in such
terms. That's why we have turned to science. If you want to learn
something about heart disease, you won't get far thinking of the
circulatory system as a radiator system. As I have said before, there
is not a lot to be learned from thinking in the terms of folk psychology.
If there was, the people who do it for a living would not have invented
the technical language they have....<g>
> I believe nature reveals herself (or the world reveals itself) through
> her (its) essential forms that are discerned and denoted _to_ human
> imaginations (or to the mind or psyche if you prefer) _by_ the
> sensibilites. Or, if you prefer, the more tritely and slightly
> modified 'what you perceive is what you get.' Still, what is the
> structure of the necessary forms?
>
> I think that people can easily recoginze and manipulate these forms
> (via their perception(s) and conception(s); via their sensibilites) in
> their imaginations. I think any arguement over which are
> representations, and which are visual images, irrelevant and
> distracting; there is a feature or features common to any of these
> forms. I can perceive of 'learning' as a process of recognition,
> algining the necessary forms and bringing them into logical and
> physical accord. I think a lot can be gained by devising and
> developing a computational model along these lines.
>
When you say 'I think' and 'I believe', consider how that might be read.
It may be taken as an indication of the limits of what you know relative
to what is known. A bit like if I say "I think e=m/c^3 " - a physicist
would say "ah, - your belief is incorrect - e=mc^2". When people do this
in my subject it can be quite amusing to hear people say words to the
effect that "in their personal opinion, e=m/c^3" etc..... From the conferences
I have been to, very few physical or bilogical scientists tolerate such
nonsense *within* their profession.
I think the way to look at the so called professionals views on these matters
is to appreciate that when you ask a question what you get back is not so
much what they personally "believe", but their professional appraisal of
how the *evidence* looks....
> This is a broad and general belief and perhaps pretty irregular
> thoughts I grant. None-the-less, I believe I am of sound mind, that I
> am capable of seeing things the way they really are, instead of only
> the way I would like them to be, or the way some authority tells me
> they are. I am not mentally de-ranged, have no psychological problems,
> take no medications, and I enjoy a peaceful co-existence with my wife
> and children, within my community, and with all those around me. I am
> not troubled in any way. I have a high enough IQ and a fair amount of
> real-life experience to attempt to figure these things out for myself.
> I have spent a fairly long time surveying and investigating the field,
> so I do not consider myself naive, albeit, to be competely honest, my
> wife admits to often thinking of me as her little boy.
Well, I don't think one *can* figure these things out for oneself. The
truth, as they say is "out there" and one needs science to make sense
of it, not contemplative moments of self analysis.
>
> So, to sum up, I see nothing wrong with the perspective that I have
> adopted. I am trying to "see" though the whole thing which I
> admittedly fail to comprehend well enough. In this way, I consider
> my thoughts about the subject to be valid. If I am wrong feel free to
> tell me so, but I do not think it appropriate for men of good
> conscious and honest intentions to attempt to derail or belittle
> someone or someview simply to establish or repeat another point of
> view or set of convictions.
As MM said in another thread, it helps sometimes to play devil's advocate
and turn one's favorite position on its head. I try that by reading Jerry
Fodor's work - but find it well nigh impossible to get a coherent picture <g>.
Neil gives me a good run for my money in this newsgroup too (as does Peter).
--
David Longley
Neil Rickert
>> >The ways in which we think initially must be based on the way of physiology
>> >and anatomy is instructed to develop by our DNA.
>> I doubt that. I doubt that the information carrying capacity of the
>> DNA is large enough to encode the details of how we think. Or, to
>> say it different, I expect that thinking has a large component of
>> learned behavior.
>I said the *way* we think, not *what* we think.
Right. That is what I was talking about. AI professionals have been
working for several decades in an attempt to encode the *way* we
think into software. They have not yet reached nirvana. It is
evidently a very complex problem, and would take a lot of DNA to
encode. I personally doubt that they will ever succeed. Instead I
suggest that they would need an effective learning system which could
learn suitable ways to think from experience.
Incidently, there seems to be plenty of evidence that different
people have different styles of thinking. Some people have more
verbal styles of thinking, others think visually, while yet others
have kinesthetic aspects to their thinking. This fits very well with
the idea that we learn to think. It is harder to fit this evidence
with the idea that the way we think is encoded in DNA, for then the
variations in ways of thinking would have to be encoded on the
relatively small proportion of DNA that varies from person to
person.
Incidently your statement is an implicit claim that it is possible to
separate the *way* we think from *what* we think. I would have
thought that any such a claim was methodologically solipsistic, and
contrary to the Quine-Hume thesis.
>> >As MM said in another thread, it helps sometimes to play devil's advocate
>> >and turn one's favorite position on its head. I try that by reading Jerry
>> >Fodor's work - but find it well nigh impossible to get a coherent picture<g>
>> >Neil gives me a good run for my money in this newsgroup too (as does Peter).
>> I'm glad to hear that I challenge you. I am disappointed that you still
>> don't grasp how seriously I disagree with Fodor.
>Well, perhps you or someone else could do me a service by reviewing what
>Fodor is trying to say. He seems to be the self appointed spokesman for
>the methodology of Cognitive Science and the merits of folk psychology.
I wouldn't try to explain what Fodor is trying to say. Amongst other
problems, he says too much for me to be able to describe in digested
form. Moreover, since I disagree with so much I would have
difficulty giving a fair report. To oversimplify, I suppose I could
characterize his writings as rejoicing in the received wisdom of folk
psychology and of Chomsky's approach to language. Generally
speaking, he does this very well.
>I accept that you claim to reject the latter, but I find much in what you
>write to persuade me that you, like Peter, implicitly practice what he
>preaches.
All that you see is that I use the standard idioms of our natural
language. The technical language in which I might prefer to use is
incommensurate with the technical language which you would want to
use. Thus I see little alternative but to stick to the natural
language we share, in spite of its inadequacies.
David Longley
> In <827085...@longley.demon.co.uk> David Longley <Da...@longley.demon.co.uk>
> writes:
> >In article <4i9fjm$2...@huron.eel.ufl.edu>
> > mit...@readware.com "Ken Ewell" writes:
>
>
> >The ways in which we think initially must be based on the way of physiology
> >and anatomy is instructed to develop by our DNA.
>
> I doubt that. I doubt that the information carrying capacity of the
> DNA is large enough to encode the details of how we think. Or, to
> say it different, I expect that thinking has a large component of
> learned behavior.
I said the *way* we think, not *what* we think.
>
> >As MM said in another thread, it helps sometimes to play devil's advocate
> >and turn one's favorite position on its head. I try that by reading Jerry
> >Fodor's work - but find it well nigh impossible to get a coherent picture<g>
> >Neil gives me a good run for my money in this newsgroup too (as does Peter).
>
> I'm glad to hear that I challenge you. I am disappointed that you still
> don't grasp how seriously I disagree with Fodor.
>
Well, perhps you or someone else could do me a service by reviewing what
Fodor is trying to say. He seems to be the self appointed spokesman for
the methodology of Cognitive Science and the merits of folk psychology.
I accept that you claim to reject the latter, but I find much in what you
write to persuade me that you, like Peter, implicitly practice what he
preaches.
--
David Longley
David Longley
> In <827183...@longley.demon.co.uk> David Longley <Da...@longley.demon.co.uk>
> writes:
> >In article <4iikqg$r...@mp.cs.niu.edu> ric...@cs.niu.edu "Neil Rickert" writes:>
> >> >The ways in which we think initially must be based on the way of physiology
> >> >and anatomy is instructed to develop by our DNA.
>
> >> I doubt that. I doubt that the information carrying capacity of the
> >> DNA is large enough to encode the details of how we think. Or, to
> >> say it different, I expect that thinking has a large component of
> >> learned behavior.
>
> >I said the *way* we think, not *what* we think.
>
> Right. That is what I was talking about. AI professionals have been
> working for several decades in an attempt to encode the *way* we
> think into software. They have not yet reached nirvana. It is
> evidently a very complex problem, and would take a lot of DNA to
> encode. I personally doubt that they will ever succeed. Instead I
> suggest that they would need an effective learning system which could
> learn suitable ways to think from experience.
Our DNA dictates how are noses, eyes etc, limbs and neurones grow. These
basically determine how we behave. We learn our own language through the
environment we are in, but there is little evidence to suggest that our
languages really differ all that much, even Chomsky makes that point.
However, the point here is that scientific language, as a universal
language is an objective language which is to be contrasted with the
heuristics which comprise the spontaneous way in which we naturally
think. In a way one could say that it is because of the limitations
imposed by the idiosyncratic vistas we have, ie our own physiology,
that science is so valuable.
My point originaly was that the way we naturally think is largely
determined by the way our physiology is structured. As simple
examples we use words like sweet, bitter, sour, bright, dim, heavy,
light etc. to make sense of the world, and as such a limited world.
Science not only *de-anthropomorphizes* and *extensionalizes*, but
generally decentres.
>
> Incidently, there seems to be plenty of evidence that different
> people have different styles of thinking. Some people have more
> verbal styles of thinking, others think visually, while yet others
> have kinesthetic aspects to their thinking. This fits very well with
> the idea that we learn to think. It is harder to fit this evidence
> with the idea that the way we think is encoded in DNA, for then the
> variations in ways of thinking would have to be encoded on the
> relatively small proportion of DNA that varies from person to
> person.
I think the differences are largely trivial, and even where we make
much of it, would you not think it likely that these differences are
based on UCRs which reflect natural variation in physiological systems
in turn determined by DNA?
--
David Longley
Neil Rickert
>In article <4iknlk$m...@mp.cs.niu.edu> ric...@cs.niu.edu "Neil Rickert" writes:
>Our DNA dictates how are noses, eyes etc, limbs and neurones grow.
If a child grew up with its nose pushed to one side, the child would
develop a misshapen nose. If a child grows with one of his eyes
occluded, he will develop ambliopia or some other problem with that
eye. When Chinese used to bind the feet of women, they grew up with
deformed feet. The number of bits required for the DNA to specify
the connectivity of the neural network far exceeds the information
carrying capacity of the DNA. No, the DNA does not dictate how these
grow. The DNA provides only part of the information.
> We learn our own language through the
>environment we are in, but there is little evidence to suggest that our
>languages really differ all that much, even Chomsky makes that point.
There are enormous differences between languages. Chomsky assumes
that language consists of grammar, and he largely ignores semantics.
>My point originaly was that the way we naturally think is largely
>determined by the way our physiology is structured. As simple
>examples we use words like sweet, bitter, sour, bright, dim, heavy,
>light etc. to make sense of the world, and as such a limited world.
Are you suggesting, with Fodor, that these are a priori concepts
encoded in our DNA, that conceptual knowledge is innate, and
empirical evidence has no important role? Or do you just have your
dogmas mixed.
>> Incidently, there seems to be plenty of evidence that different
>> people have different styles of thinking. Some people have more
>> verbal styles of thinking, others think visually, while yet others
>> have kinesthetic aspects to their thinking. This fits very well with
>> the idea that we learn to think. It is harder to fit this evidence
>> with the idea that the way we think is encoded in DNA, for then the
>> variations in ways of thinking would have to be encoded on the
>> relatively small proportion of DNA that varies from person to
>> person.
>I think the differences are largely trivial, and even where we make
>much of it, would you not think it likely that these differences are
>based on UCRs which reflect natural variation in physiological systems
>in turn determined by DNA?
No, I would not think it is based on hypothetical UCRs.
Neil Rickert
>ric...@cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert) wrote:
>>There are enormous differences between languages. Chomsky assumes
>>that language consists of grammar, and he largely ignores semantics.
>Actually, my associate spoke with Noam Chomsky about this. N, Chomsky
>does not ignore semantics, he complains about it, calling most of what
>is called semantics: pseudo-semanticism.
Well, ok. In his writings on language he largely ignores semantics.
It is not surprising that he takes a stronger position in informal
discussion.
> I can tell you that he does
>not necissarily hold with Hobbs and others that hold the line of
>lingusitic thinking that there is nothing that is not abitrary in the
>institution of speech.
That is a very weak way of describing Chomsky's position. Let me be
equally weak, and say that I don't necessarily agree with Chomsky's
view of language.
David Longley
> ......................................... AI professionals have been
> working for several decades in an attempt to encode the *way* we
> think into software. They have not yet reached nirvana. It is
> evidently a very complex problem, and would take a lot of DNA to
> encode. I personally doubt that they will ever succeed. Instead I
> suggest that they would need an effective learning system which could
> learn suitable ways to think from experience.
>
We clearly agree on this.
As I have said elsewhere, I think classic Ai has been misguided in it's
attempts to emulate the way we think. Rather, It should look to the
artifical language of logic and extensional technology already in use
by scientists and others who use "effective" methods to improve the
way they go about their business.
"Psychology", as explication of our natural assessment strategies is
not the best source of material for AI.
--
David Longley
Ken Ewell
>There are enormous differences between languages. Chomsky assumes
>that language consists of grammar, and he largely ignores semantics.
Actually, my associate spoke with Noam Chomsky about this. N, Chomsky
does not ignore semantics, he complains about it, calling most of what
is called semantics: pseudo-semanticism. I can tell you that he does
Oliver Sparrow
Message-ID: <57313...@chatham.demon.co.uk>
Date: Wednesday, Mar 20, 1996 09.04.08
Organization: None
Reply-To: oh...@chatham.demon.co.uk
X-Newsreader: Newswin Alpha 0.7
Lines: 57
In article: <4i9fjh$2...@huron.eel.ufl.edu> mit...@readware.com (Ken Ewell) writes:
> All very plainly said, thank you Oliver. Could you rephase this with
> your thoughts on how you suppose the "vectors" might be construed, and
> what might constitute the decision space, in more objective terms?
Consider two or so modules which have become specialised on doing something
or other within a brain: within a domain of attention - foveal vision, whatever - they
emit a signal which measures the degree to which, perhaps, redness (on one case)
and biaxial symmetry (in the other) is present. The two signals can be considered as
vectors which span a span; and the space has domain in which (red+symmetry) is
found, (red but no symmetry) and so forth. A rose might be evoked by (clearly much
more complex) but nevertheless similar system of primitive identification, with the
system overall learning that the domain (red + symmetry + this, + that) with values
between (r[a,b], s[c,d],...[..]) define a domain in which 'roseness' is present. The idea
of "ball" would be built into a closely related but distrinct domain; and so forth. One can
see how such a top down process of learning can occur and how such a bottom - up
system of modularisation can be bult into the genome. There are rpoblems - with red
bars of soap shaped like roses, I suppose - but it's not a bad model.
We know that something not a million miles away from this happens in speech
generation and in some motor skill areas. One can extend this to concepts
rather than percepts. Suppose that there were a set of concept primitive
generators which did the same sorts of tasks: that an idea is made of lots of
bits of meccano, rather as systems dynamics folk see policy and strategy questions
as made of archetypic structures or as semioticians see messages and stories as
comprised of their own (iffy) periodic table. One would, therefore, have a set of
vectors which were being expressed when a concept field (like the fovea,
above, but a domain of cognition, not a domain of perception) was under
scrutiny. This example of the many potential structures which might be aroused
would be alert, that one would remain sleeping. The vectors that they emit
would differ, for this one would be buzzing with resonant enthusiasm, that
one dead to the world and all its follies. The resultant would point to a zone
in "concept space" where other structres would take note of it: set theory in
action, so to speak.
My point, *finally* to bring this rough beast to Bethlehem, is that well-embedded
knowledge is that which evokes a strong and consistent mapping to a point in this
space, whereas weakly-learned, unembedded knowledge evokes diffuse responses
that point all over the shop. Unambiguous responses can be a part of what happens
next - they are players in their own right, adding to the working sof the overall system.
Mushy, weak responses are not so embedded.
Knowledge that is not represented symbolically - which is just known, as we know that
we like raspberry jam - is, in this model, the consequences of harmonised, focused
activity across an ensemble of these discrete systems of representation. It is, in the terms
that I have used above, well-embedded in the system. I suggested that common sense
is the name that we give to knowledge that has this quality of unambiguity, of being
supported widely by voting logic, but which is not reducible to symbolic or analytical
representation. We know our minds about raspberry jam, but not why we know them.
It doesn't stop us enjoying it, buying it, making it: that's common sense.
_________________________________________________
Oliver Sparrow
oh...@chatham.demon.co.uk
Peter_...@uk.ibm.com
>>
>Well, perhps you or someone else could do me a service by reviewing what
>Fodor is trying to say. He seems to be the self appointed spokesman for
>the methodology of Cognitive Science and the merits of folk psychology.
>I accept that you claim to reject the latter, but I find much in what you
>write to persuade me that you, like Peter, implicitly practice what he
>preaches.
I think you'd better stop this rather stupid 'black hat/white hat' mentality.
Cheers,
Pete Lupton
David Yeo
>>
>Well, perhps you or someone else could do me a service by reviewing what
>Fodor is trying to say. He seems to be the self appointed spokesman for
>the methodology of Cognitive Science and the merits of folk psychology.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
David, I would be careful about over generalising re: "the methodology of
Cognitive Science". Fodor's obfuscations are but one methodology, and in
the view of a growing number of cognitive scientists a very implausible
one, employed by Cognitive Science. It is more appropriately viewed as
one extreme on the continuum of methodologies
Cheers,
- David Yeo (Applied Cognitive Science, University of Toronto)
ENTICY1
<Da...@longley.demon.co.uk> writes:
>We clearly agree on this.
>
Well I don't.
>As I have said elsewhere, I think classic Ai has been misguided in it's
>attempts to emulate the way we think. Rather, It should look to the
>artifical language of logic and extensional technology already in use
>by scientists and others who use "effective" methods to improve the
>way they go about their business.
>
Classical AI has been misguided attempting to emulate the way we think
because it has not done so at all. It has attempted to replicate the
things
that thinking results in. Your suggestion is throwing in the towel before
actually ever having gotten up a sweat. The point of replication of
intelligence
is not to improve what has been accomplished it is to define HOW it is
accomplished. That can not be accomplished by established edict. It has to
be
arrived at by the process of thinking. Something NONE of AI has
accomplished.
I quote: (From Ramifications of Replicated Intelligence)
2.1 Perhaps the most prevalent system for replication of human reasoning
is the Expert System. An application of IF-THEN-ELSE rules to problem
solving and classification. Claimed as including decision making and
configuration it is a wonder such decision process has not generated a
definable meaning of Intelligence. Perhaps it is because there is none in
an Expert System.
2.2 If there was an instruction set of IF-THEN-WHY-THEN there could stand
the chance of intelligence in such a system but in order to ask the
question, "WHY?," the system would have to be aware it contained
information that made sense not only in and to itself but in a grander
scheme of things as a part of a whole of information. With far diverse
concepts being comparable.
2.3 There is no algorithm published or in use today that affords the WHY.
Now it can be said that if enough IF-THEN-ELSE statements are linked
together a semblance of WHY will emerge but that then brings to mind at
what point does the instruction either double back on itself or come to a
halt? Because if it comes to a halt there is a limit on asking WHY and if
it doubles back the same WHY will be asked which means there was no
comprehension of the answer to it in the first place.
>"Psychology", as explication of our natural assessment strategies is
>not the best source of material for AI.
>
This I WILL agree with.
>--
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Lee Kent Hempfling ENT...@aol.com
http://members.aol.com/enticy1/ntc/index.htm
Neutronics Technologies NTC
Stanard Disclaimers Go Here Inset At Will
I live on Stanard Street.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
ENTICY1
<oh...@chatham.demon.co.uk> writes:
>One can see how such a top down process of learning can occur and how
such a >bottom -up system of modularisation can be bult into the genome.
There are >rpoblems -with red bars of soap shaped like roses, I suppose -
but it's not a bad >model.
Let me try to be very direct here. In a digital computer concepts are
re-presented by bits and bytes. They are concepts only because the
assembly has order. Why would you think the brain functions differently? I
am not saying there are bits or bytes of data in the brain and it is NOT
binary... what I am saying is that it is not hard for you to comprehend
that a man made system of computation uses representational methods for
replication yet at the same time you will declare that the brain uses what
can be observed as the method of storage or computation. That is absurd.
>The two signals can be considered as
>vectors which span a span; and the space has domain in which
(red+symmetry) is
>found, (red but no symmetry) and so forth.
Wait a minute here...... symmetry is a concept. Would you declare that
your computer store symmetry? Of course not it would store what made up
YOUR motif of symmetry in ITS OWN WAY. Red is a concept. Would you declare
that your computer store red? Of course not it would store what made a
representational red when converted to your method of recognition. The
brain is no different.
If you remember..... the same element (the neuron) has to accomplish many
different tasks. That would logically mean that the tasks would be
convertible regardless of what their outcome would appear to make them the
internal processing procedure must be identicle, so is the memory form.
>My point, *finally* to bring this rough beast to Bethlehem, is that
well-embedded
knowledge is that which evokes a strong and consistent mapping to a point
in this
space, whereas weakly-learned, unembedded knowledge evokes diffuse
responses
that point all over the shop. Unambiguous responses can be a part of what
happens
next - they are players in their own right, adding to the working sof the
overall system.
Mushy, weak responses are not so embedded.
What you are speaking of are memories that are supported by new input or
not. Those that are supported are no different in method than those that
are not. It is the relational comparison of the parts of the memories that
coincide not the overall memories themselves. DIfferent populations of
values connect in variance and recombine in toto to result in a memory
that is either, or, or a variation between a previously supported or non
supported memory. There are no mushy , weak responses just those that have
not been supported as much as others. Which mean they do not reside as
high in the time line of memory and are therefore not as easy to 'recall'.
L Metcalfe
>I think this is just *wrong*.
>It's not *unfamiliar* - it just doesn't help to even think in such
>terms. That's why we have turned to science. If you want to learn
>something about heart disease, you won't get far thinking of the
>circulatory system as a radiator system. As I have said before, there
>is not a lot to be learned from thinking in the terms of folk psychology.
>If there was, the people who do it for a living would not have invented
>the technical language they have....<g>
>> I think that people can easily recoginze and manipulate these forms
>> (via their perception(s) and conception(s); via their sensibilites) in
>> their imaginations. I think any arguement over which are
>> representations, and which are visual images, irrelevant and
>> distracting; there is a feature or features common to any of these
>> forms. I can perceive of 'learning' as a process of recognition,
>> algining the necessary forms and bringing them into logical and
>> physical accord. I think a lot can be gained by devising and
>> developing a computational model along these lines.
>When you say 'I think' and 'I believe', consider how that might be read.
<snip>
I think you're missing the point.
We can see, in retrospect, the product assurance architecture
necessitates that urgent consideration be applied to the structural
design, based on system engineering concepts. Without going into the
technical details, any associated supporting element presents
extremely interesting challenges to the evolution of specifications
over a given time period. In this regard, the fully integrated test
program must utilize and be functionally interwoven with
the total system rationale. Further, the interrelation of system
and/or subsystem technologies is functionally equivalent and parallel
to the sophisticated hardware. Interestingly enough, a constant flow
of effective communication is further compounded when taking into
account the subsystem compatibility testing. To further describe and
annotate, the characterization of specific criteria requires
considerable systems analysis and trade-off studies to arrive at the
postulated use of dialog management technology.
On the other hand, the product configuration baseline necessitates
that urgent consideration be applied to the preliminary qualification
limit. Of course, the incorporation of additional mission constraints
is further compounded when taking into account the management-by-
contention principle. For example, initiation of critical subsystem
development adds overriding performance constraints to possible
bidirectional logical relationship approaches. In this regard, the
characterization of specific criteria maximizes the probability of
project success, yet minimizes cost and time required for the
subsystem compatibility testing. Similarly, the product assurance
architecture recognizes other systems' importance and the
necessity for the greater fight-worthiness concept. Further, a
constant flow of effective communication must utilize and be
functionally interwoven with the postulated use of dialog
management technology.
Thus, a constant flow of effective communication must utilize and be
functionally interwoven with possible bidirectional logical
relationship approaches. As a resultant implication, the incorporation
of additional mission constraints recognizes other systems' importance
and the necessity for the structural design, based on system
engineering concepts. It is assumed that any associated supporting
element adds overriding performance constraints to the
preliminary qualification limit. Without going into the technical
details, the independent functional principle adds explicit
performance limits to any discrete configuration mode. In
particular, the product configuration baseline maximizes the
probability of project success, yet minimizes cost and time required
for the philosophy of commonality and standardization.
It should be noted that the characterization of specific criteria
requires considerable systems analysis and trade-off studies to arrive
at the subsystem compatibility testing.
David Longley
> In <827260...@longley.demon.co.uk> David Longley <Da...@longley.demon.co.uk>
> writes:
> >In article <4iknlk$m...@mp.cs.niu.edu> ric...@cs.niu.edu "Neil Rickert" writes:>
> >Our DNA dictates how are noses, eyes etc, limbs and neurones grow.
>
> If a child grew up with its nose pushed to one side, the child would
> develop a misshapen nose. If a child grows with one of his eyes
> occluded, he will develop ambliopia or some other problem with that
> eye. When Chinese used to bind the feet of women, they grew up with
> deformed feet. The number of bits required for the DNA to specify
> the connectivity of the neural network far exceeds the information
> carrying capacity of the DNA. No, the DNA does not dictate how these
> grow. The DNA provides only part of the information.
>
Of course the environment plays an important role. To start with, that's
where we get oxygen, food and water from. You are missing my point, which
is that it is the range of behaviour is basically a function of our DNA
determined anatomy and physiology. Take our dexterity, our ability to
walk upright, subtly vocalise etc. These dramatically extend our range
of behaviour relative to other mammals and other species in ways which
are frequently underappreciated. We should look more to our basic structure
*and* the information "out there" rather than what we conjecture may be
inside the head. Such "cognitivisation" in my view, is just vestigial
superstition.
> > We learn our own language through the
> >environment we are in, but there is little evidence to suggest that our
> >languages really differ all that much, even Chomsky makes that point.
>
> There are enormous differences between languages. Chomsky assumes
> that language consists of grammar, and he largely ignores semantics.
>
These are *relatively* trivial differences. The sheer number of languages
surely makes this point. cataloging them all and their subtle nuances is
like "clever nose picking".
> >My point originaly was that the way we naturally think is largely
> >determined by the way our physiology is structured. As simple
> >examples we use words like sweet, bitter, sour, bright, dim, heavy,
> >light etc. to make sense of the world, and as such a limited world.
>
> Are you suggesting, with Fodor, that these are a priori concepts
> encoded in our DNA, that conceptual knowledge is innate, and
> empirical evidence has no important role? Or do you just have your
> dogmas mixed.
>
Not *concepts*, but *behaviours*. Tis is an important distinction and one
which was behind my remarks elsewehere on the distinction between what
Husserl called 'noesis' and 'noema', and which Piaget (somewhat
'coincidentally' ;->) referred to as 'schemes' and 'schemata'). In our
immediate context we seem to be talking of something like instruction
set and BIOS. ie 'firmware'..
> >> Incidently, there seems to be plenty of evidence that different
> >> people have different styles of thinking. Some people have more
> >> verbal styles of thinking, others think visually, while yet others
> >> have kinesthetic aspects to their thinking. This fits very well with
> >> the idea that we learn to think. It is harder to fit this evidence
> >> with the idea that the way we think is encoded in DNA, for then the
> >> variations in ways of thinking would have to be encoded on the
> >> relatively small proportion of DNA that varies from person to
> >> person.
>
> >I think the differences are largely trivial, and even where we make
> >much of it, would you not think it likely that these differences are
> >based on UCRs which reflect natural variation in physiological systems
> >in turn determined by DNA?
>
> No, I would not think it is based on hypothetical UCRs.
>
>
Well, that's the way that behaviour scientists in the 'Learning Theory',
and classicial consitioning tradition, *talk* about it. I don't mind what
*words* are used, but I think it must all be based on how our basic DNA
determined physiology works.
--
David Longley
Oliver Sparrow
The way genetics was taught a generation ago, the genotype (the
instructions on the DNA) described and outcome which the enviuronment
modified (in individuals and in grups sharing a common situation) in
order to deliver the phenotype, the range of what one found in the
field. Clearly, however, whilst evolution is recorded at the level of
the genotype, it is enacted amongst the phenotypes: what survives and
breeds is what eats, preys and humps.
This has been complicated in three ways. One is the oversold concept
of the selfish gene, whereby the goal of evolution is seen as the
struggle of bits of code (genes and sub-gene regions, junk) to
propagate themselves. The second is the useful concept of the
behavioural/ social implications of information carriers: behaviour
patterns which effect survival. Some of these may be directly coded -
high blood pressure -> irritability, perhaps? - whilst others
self-assemble when enough of a species are present: social
structures, dominance hierarchies, mechanisms of co-operation and
conflict management. Some of these transmit information of a
selective nature without recourse to genes.
The third complication comes from the understanding that genes are
often arranged in cascades which are modulated during development and
in life by what have been called homeotic genes. Spencer noted that
common ground plants (the five fingered hand, etc) could be traced
across the animal kingdom; and similar structural features are shared
amongst plants and others. These modules can be shuffled around
(objects, chaps!) in order to give rise to wildly different
structures based on comon elements. One can, for example, switch on
the "leg" homeotic gene in fruit flies and get legs where antennae
should be, or - literally - eyes on their elbows, where sensory
bristeles ought to have developed.
There is, therefore, a great deal more than the shuffling and
modification of bits of code going on in evolution. Much of what is
happening is occuring in a context - that of the rest of the
organism, of its operating context. One cannot understand the outcome
without understanding the context, which is changed by the outcome.
Looking back, one can see why; but looking forward, who could have
foreseen that combining a tube-based construction with a
front-and-end orientation would have given rise to 90% of the
animal and insect life on earth today; or what form thee might have
taken. Yet their *code* is braodly similar, only tweaked in modest
ways. We share about a third of our genetic sequences with bread
yeast, for example; and rat liver will photosynthesise quite happily
if given chlorophyll and a couple of co-factors. It's how it's put
together that matters, not what it says.
_________________________________________________
Oliver Sparrow
oh...@chatham.demon.co.uk
Ken Ewell
>In article <82731386...@chatham.demon.co.uk>, Oliver Sparrow
><oh...@chatham.demon.co.uk> writes:
>Let me try to be very direct here. In a digital computer concepts are
>re-presented by bits and bytes. They are concepts only because the
>assembly has order. Why would you think the brain functions differently? I
>am not saying there are bits or bytes of data in the brain and it is NOT
>binary... what I am saying is that it is not hard for you to comprehend
>that a man made system of computation uses representational methods for
>replication yet at the same time you will declare that the brain uses what
>can be observed as the method of storage or computation. That is absurd.
Well, I thought Oliver was referring to internal (mindful)
representions that are faithful to what is observed and/or otherwise
sensed. There is as much order as what is present to the
sensibilities (which is usually a lot.)
>>The two signals can be considered as
>>vectors which span a span; and the space has domain in which
>(red+symmetry) is
>>found, (red but no symmetry) and so forth.
Well red is a label, a denotation, for that structural arrangement of
light that we discern as red. Colors may be good examples of
well-embedded knowledge that are immediately denoted out of human
memory; colors, are none-the-less, observable spectrums (a particular
arrangement of forms) of light. Once could suppose that hummingbirds
can discern color as they normally prefer red flowers, or it may be
that the spectral structure for red is embedded in their physiology
and this is how they discern the color difference between flowers.
>Wait a minute here...... symmetry is a concept. Would you declare that
>your computer store symmetry? Of course not it would store what made up
>YOUR motif of symmetry in ITS OWN WAY. Red is a concept. Would you declare
>that your computer store red? Of course not it would store what made a
>representational red when converted to your method of recognition. The
>brain is no different.
Why not. Symmetry can be mathematically represented. It is true,
symmetry is a known concept, we know it now as an arrangement with
balanced or harmonious proportions; this is not to say that we could
not at one time recognize this in our observations out onto/into the
world without being able to denote exactly what it (symmetry) is; i.e.
we may have well-embbeded concepts of balance, of harmony, the word
symmetry, itself, may be derived from the perception of balance and
harmony in various arrangments. The physiology of the brain seems,
also, to be divided into balanced and harmonious proportions.
In this sense, the process of recognition can be seen to be a process
whereby perceptual, representational, images are formed in the mind as
"symmetrical arrangements," with balanced or harmonious proportions
that faithfuly reconstruct and thus denote the (form(s)) of reality
present to the sensibilities. Common sense thinking is the process by
which we recognize and discern where there is proportion, where there
is harmony, where there is balance, and where there is not.
>If you remember..... the same element (the neuron) has to accomplish many
>different tasks. That would logically mean that the tasks would be
>convertible regardless of what their outcome would appear to make them the
>internal processing procedure must be identicle, so is the memory form.
In this way conceptions and perceptions can be seen as similar
arrangements, and I repeat that "learning" can be conceived of as
bringing conceptual arrangements of structures into (symmetrical)
alignment and agreement with perceived arrangements of structures.
>>My point, *finally* to bring this rough beast to Bethlehem, is that
>>well-embedded knowledge is that which evokes a strong and consistent mapping to a point
>>in this space, whereas weakly-learned, unembedded knowledge evokes diffuse
>>responses that point all over the shop.
Yes, and this goes directly to the side thread in this subject
concerning the use of language. Words stand as our external devices
representing known ideas that we conceive of or perceive in the mind.
Those words that denote ideas we can easily relate to can be seen as
well-embedded knowledge; i.e we recognize balance and harmony of form.
Modern and particulalry obscure technical terms may (sometimes) be
seen as weakly-learned and weakly understood, although probably still
embedded knowledge, being that they are derived a litlle from both
(personal or group) perceptions and also the older more embedded
conceptions most humans already share.
>>Unambiguous responses can be a part of what
>>happens next - they are players in their own right, adding to the working sof the
>>overall system. Mushy, weak responses are not so embedded.
>What you are speaking of are memories that are supported by new input or
>not. Those that are supported are no different in method than those that
>are not. It is the relational comparison of the parts of the memories that
>coincide not the overall memories themselves. DIfferent populations of
>values connect in variance and recombine in toto to result in a memory
>that is either, or, or a variation between a previously supported or non
>supported memory.
I suspect we not only look for relational comparisons, or symmetry,
between perceived arrangements of structures and those real (forms of)
arranged structures immediately present to the sensibilities, but also
between the perceived arrangements of structures and those that are
stored in our personal memories. What is "recalled" may be an issue
of self-attention and dilligence; in a computer model this would not
be an issue.
Neil Rickert
>In article <4inet4$h...@mp.cs.niu.edu> ric...@cs.niu.edu "Neil Rickert" writes:
>> >Our DNA dictates how are noses, eyes etc, limbs and neurones grow.
>> If a child grew up with its nose pushed to one side, the child would
>> develop a misshapen nose. If a child grows with one of his eyes
>> occluded, he will develop ambliopia or some other problem with that
>> eye. When Chinese used to bind the feet of women, they grew up with
>> deformed feet. The number of bits required for the DNA to specify
>> the connectivity of the neural network far exceeds the information
>> carrying capacity of the DNA. No, the DNA does not dictate how these
>> grow. The DNA provides only part of the information.
>Of course the environment plays an important role. To start with, that's
>where we get oxygen, food and water from. You are missing my point, which
>is that it is the range of behaviour is basically a function of our DNA
>determined anatomy and physiology.
Well, no, I am not missing your point. I quite agree with it. But
you are missing my point.
> Take our dexterity, our ability to
>walk upright, subtly vocalise etc. These dramatically extend our range
>of behaviour relative to other mammals and other species in ways which
>are frequently underappreciated.
Right. We are less constrained by our DNA than are other species.
That means we have to look somewhere other than DNA to find the
source of behavior control.
> We should look more to our basic structure
>*and* the information "out there" rather than what we conjecture may be
>inside the head.
The information "out there" is quite important. But it is only
important because what is "in the head" is able to interpret it.
>> There are enormous differences between languages. Chomsky assumes
>> that language consists of grammar, and he largely ignores semantics.
>These are *relatively* trivial differences. The sheer number of languages
>surely makes this point. cataloging them all and their subtle nuances is
>like "clever nose picking".
The sheer number of languages indeed makes the point -- that the DNA
does not strongly constrain language.
>> Are you suggesting, with Fodor, that these are a priori concepts
>> encoded in our DNA, that conceptual knowledge is innate, and
>> empirical evidence has no important role? Or do you just have your
>> dogmas mixed.
>Not *concepts*, but *behaviours*.
Same thing, different words. As a behaviorist you are committed to
pretending that concepts don't count except behaviorally.
>> >I think the differences are largely trivial, and even where we make
>> >much of it, would you not think it likely that these differences are
>> >based on UCRs which reflect natural variation in physiological systems
>> >in turn determined by DNA?
>> No, I would not think it is based on hypothetical UCRs.
>Well, that's the way that behaviour scientists in the 'Learning Theory',
>and classicial consitioning tradition, *talk* about it.
And I dispute that approach. Among other problems, it assumes far
too much innate knowledge (or innate behavior or innate structure -
call it what you will).
David Longley
> In <827183...@longley.demon.co.uk>, David Longley
> <Da...@longley.demon.co.uk> writes:
> >>
> >Well, perhps you or someone else could do me a service by reviewing what
> >Fodor is trying to say. He seems to be the self appointed spokesman for
> >the methodology of Cognitive Science and the merits of folk psychology.
> >I accept that you claim to reject the latter, but I find much in what you
> >write to persuade me that you, like Peter, implicitly practice what he
> >preaches.
>
> I think you'd better stop this rather stupid 'black hat/white hat' mentality.
>
> Cheers,
> Pete Lupton
>
>
I'll repeat it then. You *implicitly* practice and explicitly extol the so
called merits of folk psychology despite the published evidence.
There's nothing *stupid* about pointing out this folly, and as to my strategy
being a 'black hat/white hat' mentality, it is nothing of the sort....just
read 'House of Cards: Psychology and Psychotherapy' Built on Myth' to get a
grasp of how stark the professional contrast is. My point has been that one
stance exists at the expense of the other.
--
David Longley
David Longley
dyeo@tortoise "David Yeo" writes:
> In <827183...@longley.demon.co.uk>, David Longley
> <Da...@longley.demon.co.uk> writes:
> >>
> >Well, perhps you or someone else could do me a service by reviewing what
> >Fodor is trying to say. He seems to be the self appointed spokesman for
> >the methodology of Cognitive Science and the merits of folk psychology.
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> David, I would be careful about over generalising re: "the methodology of
> Cognitive Science". Fodor's obfuscations are but one methodology, and in
> the view of a growing number of cognitive scientists a very implausible
> one, employed by Cognitive Science. It is more appropriately viewed as
> one extreme on the continuum of methodologies
>
> Cheers,
>
> - David Yeo (Applied Cognitive Science, University of Toronto)
>
Well, I think I have been as careful as I should be given the history
and sorry state of psychology today. I have presented the following
exract before, but it may help to present it again given the context
of recent discussions.
At the heart of 20th century logic there is a very interesting problem
(illuminated over the last three decades by W.V.O Quine (1956, 1960,
1990,1992), which seems to be divisive with respect to the
classification and analysis of 'mental' (or psychological) phenomena
as opposed to 'physical' phenomena. The problem is variously known as
Brentano's Thesis (Quine 1960), 'the problem of intensionality', or
'the content-clause problem'.
"The keynote of the mental is not the mind it is the
content-clause syntax, the idiom 'that p'".
W. V. O. Quine
Intension
The Pursuit of Truth (1990) p.71
It is the subject of this article that the solution to this problem
renders psychology and behaviour science two very different subjects
with entirely different methods and domains of application. The
problem is reflected in differences in how language treats certain
classes of terms. One class is the 'extensional' and the other
'intensional'. This article therefore sets out the relevant
contemporary research background and outlines the practical
implications which these logical classes have for the applied,
practical work of criminological psychologists. We will begin with a
few recent statements on the implications of Brentano's Thesis for
psychology as a science. The basic conclusion is that there can be no
scientific analysis, ie no reliable application of the laws of logic
or mathematics to psychological phenomena, because psychological
phenomena flout the very axioms which mathematical, logical and
computational processes must assume for valid inference. From the fact
that quantification is unreliable within intensional contexts, it
follows that both p and not-p can be held as truth values for the same
proposition, and from any system which allows such inconsistency, any
conclusion whatsoever can be inferred. The thrust of this article is
that bewilderment vanishes once one appreciates that the subject
matter of Applied Criminological Psychology is exclusively that of
behaviour, and that its methodology is exclusively deductive and
analytical. This is taken to be a clear vindication of Quine's 1960
dictum that:
'If we are limning the true and ultimate structure of
reality, the canonical scheme for us is the austere
scheme that knows no quotation but direct quotation and
no propositional attitudes but only the physical
constitution and behavior of organisms.'
W.V.O Quine
Word and Object 1960 p 221
For:
'Once it is shown that a region of discourse is not
extensional, then according to Quine, we have reason to
doubt its claim to describe the structure of reality.'
C. Hookway
Logic: Canonical Notation and Extensionality
Quine (1988)
The problem with intensional (or common sense or 'folk') psychology
has been clearly spelled out by Nelson (1992):
'The trouble is, according to Brentano's thesis, no such
theory is forthcoming on strictly naturalistic, physical
grounds. If you want semantics, you need a full-blown,
irreducible psychology of intensions.
There is a counterpart in modern logic of the thesis of
irreducibility. The language of physical and biological
science is largely *extensional*. It can be formulated
(approximately) in the familiar predicate calculus. The
language of psychology, however, is *intensional*. For
the moment it is good enough to think of an
*intensional* sentence as one containing words for
*intensional* attitudes such as belief.
Roughly what the counterpart thesis means is that
important features of extensional, scientific language
on which inference depends are not present in
intensional sentences. In fact intensional words and
sentences are precisely those expressions in which
certain key forms of logical inference break down.'
R. J. Nelson (1992)
Naming and Reference p.39-42
and explicitly by Place (1987):
'The first-order predicate calculus is an extensional
logic in which Leibniz's Law is taken as an axiomatic
principle. Such a logic cannot admit 'intensional' or
'referentially opaque' predicates whose defining
characteristic is that they flout that principle.'
U. T. Place (1987)
Skinner Re-Skinned P. 244
In B.F. Skinner Consensus and Controversy
Eds. S. Modgil & C. Modgil
The *intension* of a sentence is its 'meaning', or the property it
conveys. It is sometimes used almost synonymously with the
'proposition' or 'content' communicated. The *extension* of a term or
sentence on the other hand is the CLASS of things of which the term or
sentence can be said to be true. Thus, things belong to the same
extension of a term or sentence if they are the same members of the
designated class, whilst things share the same intension,
(purportedly) if they share the same property. Here's how Quine (1987)
makes the distinction:
'If it makes sense to speak of properties, it should
make clear sense to speak of sameness and differences of
properties; but it does not. If a thing has this
property and not that, then certainly this property and
that are different properties. But what if everything
that has this property has that one as well, and vice
versa? Should we say that they are the same property? If
so, well and good; no problem. But people do not take
that line. I am told that every creature with a heart
has kidneys, and vice versa; but who will say that the
property of having a heart is the same as that of having
kidneys?
In short, coextensiveness of properties is not seen as
sufficient for their identity. What then is? If an
answer is given, it is apt to be that they are identical
if they do not just happen to be coextensive, but are
necessarily coextensive. But NECESSITY, q.v., is too
hazy a notion to rest with.
We have been able to go on blithely all these years
without making sense of identity between properties,
simply because the utility of the notion of property
does not hinge on identifying or distinguishing them.
That being the case, why not clean up our act by just
declaring coextensive properties identical? Only because
it would be a disturbing breach of usage, as seen in the
case of the heart and kidneys. To ease that shock, we
change the word; we speak no longer of properties, but
of CLASSES......
We must acquiesce in ordinary language for ordinary
purposes, and the word 'property' is of a piece with it.
But also the notion of property or its reasonable
facsimile that takes over, since these contexts never
hinge on distinguishing coextensive properties. One
instance among many of the use of classes in mathematics
is seen under DEFINITION, in the definition of number.
For science it is classes SI, properties NO.'
W. V. O. Quine (1987)
Classes versus Properties
QUIDDITIES:
It has been argued quite convincingly by Quine (1956,1960) that the
scope and language of science is entirely extensional, that the
intensional is purely attributive, instrumental or creative, and that
there can not be a universal language of thought or 'mentalese', since
such a system would presume determinate translation relations.
Different languages are different systems of behaviour which may
achieve similar ends, but they do not support direct, determinate
translation relations. This is Quine's (1960) 'Indeterminacy of
Translation Thesis'. Despite its import, we frequently behave 'as if'
it is legitimate to directly translate (substitute), and we do this
not only within our own language as illustrated below, but within our
own thinking and language.
This profound point of mathematical logic can be made very clear with
a simple, but representative example. The sub-set of intensional
idioms with which we are most concerned in our day to day dealings
with people are the so called 'propositional attitudes' (saying that,
remembering that, believing that, knowing that, hoping that and so
on). If we report that someone 'said that' he hated his father, it is
often the case that we do not report what is articulated verbatim, ie
precisely, what was said. Instead, we frequently 'approximate' the
'meaning' of what was said and consider this legitimate on the grounds
that the 'meaning' is preserved.
Unfortunately, this assumes that, in contexts of propositional
attitude ('says that', 'thinks that', 'believes that', and, quite
pertinently, 'knows that' etc.) we are free to substitute terms or
phrases which are otherwise co-referential as we can extensionally
with 7+3 = 10 and 5+5=10. That is, it assumes that inference within
intensional contexts is valid. Yet nobody would report that if Oedipus
said that he wanted to marry Jocasta that he said that he wanted to
marry his mother! The problem with intensional idioms is that they can
not be substituted for one another and still preserve the truth
functionality of the contexts within which they occur. In fact, they
can only be directly quoted verbatim, ie as behaviours. Now
substitutivity of co-referential identicals 'salva veritate'
(Leibniz's Law) is in fact a basic extensional axiom of first order
logic, and is a law which underpins all valid inference. One of the
objectives of this paper is therefore to specify in practical detail
how in fact we propose to develop a system for inmate reporting which
does not flout Leibniz's Law, but takes it as central. This is an
inversion of current practices in significant areas of the work of
applied psychologists, and whilst the example cited above is a simple
one, it is nevertheless highly representative of much of the
problematic work of practising psychologists, who, often ignorant of
the above constraint on dealing with the problems which logicians have
identified with the intensional, are, as a consequence, therefore more
often 'creative' in their dealings with inmates and in their report
writing, than is often appreciated, even though the 'Puzzle About
Belief' and modal contexts is well documented (Church 1954, Kripke
1979).
Dretske (1980) put the issue as follows:
'If I know that the train is moving and you know that
its wheels are turning, it does not follow that I know
what you know just because the train never moves without
its wheels turning. More generally, if all (and only) Fs
are G, one can nonetheless know that something is F
without knowing that it is G. Extensionally equivalent
expressions, when applied to the same object, do not
(necessarily) express the same cognitive content.
Furthermore, if Tom is my uncle, one can not infer (with
a possible exception to be mentioned later) that if S
knows that Tom is getting married, he thereby knows that
my uncle is getting married. The content of a cognitive
state, and hence the cognitive state itself, depends
(for its identity) on something beyond the extension or
reference of the terms we use to express the content. I
shall say, therefore, that a description of a cognitive
state, is non-extensional.'
F. I. Dretske (1980)
The Intentionality of Cognitive States
Midwest Studies in Philosophy 5,281-294
For the discipline of psychology, the above logical analyses can be
taken either as a vindication of 20th century behaviourism/physicalism
(Quine 1960,1990,1992) or as a knockout blow to 20th century
'Cognitivism' and psychologism (methodological solipsism).
'One may accept the Brentano thesis as showing the
indispensability of intentional idioms and the
importance of an autonomous science of intention, or as
showing the baselessness of intentional idioms and the
emptiness of a science of intention. My attitude, unlike
Brentano's, is the second. To accept intentional usage
at face value is, we saw, to postulate translation
relations as somehow objectively valid though
indeterminate in principle relative to the totality of
speech dispositions. Such postulation promises little
gain in scientific insight if there is no better ground
for it than that the supposed translation relations are
presupposed by the vernacular of semantics and
intention.'
W. V. O. Quine
The Double Standard
Flight from Intension
Word and Object (1960), p218-221
In response to these mounting problems, Jerry Fodor published an
influential paper in 1980 entitled 'Methodological Solipsism
Considered as a Research Strategy for Cognitive Psychology'. In that
paper he proposed that Cognitive Psychology adopt a stance, or
restricted itself to the explication of the ways that subjects make
sense of the world from their 'own particular point of view'. This was
to be contrasted with the objectives of 'Naturalistic Psychology' or
'Evidential Behaviourism'.
Methodological Solipsism, as opposed to Methodological Behaviourism,
takes 'cognitive processes', mental contents (meanings/propositions)
or 'propositional attitudes' of folk/commonsense psychology at face
value. It accepts that there is a 'Language of Thought' (Fodor 1975),
that there is a universal 'mentalese' which natural languages map
onto, and which express thoughts as 'propositions'. It examines the
apparent causal relations and processes of 'attribution' between these
processes and other psychological processes which have propositional
content. It accepts what is known as the 'formality condition', ie
that thinking is a purely formal, syntactic, computational affair
which therefore has no room for semantic notions such as truth or
falsehood. Such computational processes are therefore indifferent to
whether beliefs are about the world per se (can be said to have a
reference), or are just the views of the belief holder (ie may be
purely imaginary). Technically, this amounts to beliefs not being
subject to 'existential or universal quantification' (where
'existential' refers to the logical quantifier, E 'there exists at
least one', and 'universal' A refers to 'for all').
Methodological Solipsism looks to the *relations* between beliefs 'de
dicto', which are opaque to the holder (he may believe that the
Morning Star is the planet Venus, but not believe that the Evening
Star is the planet Venus, and therefore believe different things of
the Morning and Evening Stars). Methodological Solipsism does not
concern itself with the transparency of beliefs, ie their referential,
or 'de re' status. Some further examples of what all this entails
might be helpful here, since the implications of Methodological
Solipsism are both subtle and far ranging. The critical notions in
what follow are 'transfer of training', 'generalisation decrement',
'inductive vs. deductive inference', and the distinction between
'heuristics' and 'algorithms'.
Here is how Fodor's paper was summarised in abstract:
'Explores the distinction between 2 doctrines, both of
which inform theory construction in much of modern
cognitive psychology: the representational theory of
mind and the computational theory of mind. According to
the former, propositional attitudes are viewed as
relations that organisms bear to mental representations.
According to the latter, mental processes have access
only to formal (nonsemantic) properties of the mental
representations over which they are defined. The
following claims are defended: (1) The traditional
dispute between rational and naturalistic psychology is
plausibly viewed as an argument about the status of the
computational theory of mind. (2) To accept the
formality condition is to endorse a version of
methodological solipsism. (3) The acceptance of some
such condition is warranted, at least for that part of
psychology that concerns itself with theories of the
mental causation of behavior. A glossary and several
commentaries are included.'
J A Fodor (1980)
Methodological solipsism considered as a research
strategy in cognitive psychology.
Massachusetts Inst of Technology
Behavioral and Brain Sciences; 1980 Mar Vol 3(1) 63-109
Some of the commentaries, particularly those by Loar or Rey clarify
what is, admittedly, quite a difficult, but substantial view widely
held by graduate psychologists.
'If psychological explanation is a matter of describing
computational processes, then the references of our
thoughts do not matter to psychological explanation.
This is Fodor's main argument.....Notice that Fodor's
argument can be taken a step further. For not only are
the references of our thoughts not mentioned in
cognitive psychology; nothing that DETERMINES their
references, like Fregian senses, is mentioned
either....Neither reference nor reference-determining
sense have a place in the description of computational
processes.'
B. F. Loar
Ibid p.89
Not all of the commentaries were as formal, as the following
commentary from one of the UK's most eminent logicians makes clear:
'Fodor thinks that when we explain behaviour by mental
causes, these causes would be given "opaque"
descriptions "true in virtue of the way the agent
represents the objects of his wants (intentions,
beliefs, etc.) to HIMSELF" (his emphasis). But what an
agent intends may be widely different from the way he
represents the object of his intention to himself. A man
cannot shuck off the responsibility for killing another
man by just 'directing his intention' at the firing of a
gun:
"I press a trigger - Well, I'm blessed!
he's hit my bullet with his chest!"'
P. Geach
ibid p80
The Methodological Solipsist's stance is clearly at odds with what is
required to function effectively as an APPLIED Criminological
Psychologist if 'functional effectiveness' is taken to refer to
intervention in the behaviour of an inmate with reference to his
environment. Here's how Fodor contrasted Methodological Solipsism with
the naturalistic approach:
'..there's a tradition which argues that - epistemology
to one side - it is at best a strategic mistake to
attempt to develop a psychology which individuates
mental states without reference to their environmental
causes and effects...I have in mind the tradition which
includes the American Naturalists (notably Pierce and
Dewey), all the learning theorists, and such
contemporary representatives as Quine in philosophy and
Gibson in psychology. The recurrent theme here is that
psychology is a branch of biology, hence that one must
view the organism as embedded in a physical environment.
The psychologist's job is to trace those
organism/environment interactions which constitute its
behavior.'
J. Fodor (1980) ibid. p.64
Here is how Stich (1991) reviewed Fodor's position ten years on:
'This argument was part of a larger project. Influenced
by Quine, I have long been suspicious about the
integrity and scientific utility of the commonsense
notions of meaning and intentional content. This is not,
of course, to deny that the intentional idioms of
ordinary discourse have their uses, nor that the uses
are important. But, like Quine, I view ordinary
intentional locutions as projective, context sensitive,
observer relative, and essentially dramatic. They are
not the sorts of locutions we should welcome in serious
scientific discourse. For those who share this Quinean
scepticism, the sudden flourishing of cognitive
psychology in the 1970s posed something of a problem. On
the account offered by Fodor and other observers, the
cognitive psychology of that period was exploiting both
the ontology and the explanatory strategy of commonsense
psychology. It proposed to explain cognition and certain
aspects of behavior by positing beliefs, desires, and
other psychological states with intentional content, and
by couching generalisations about the interactions among
those states in terms of their intentional content. If
this was right, then those of us who would banish talk
of content in scientific settings would be throwing out
the cognitive psychological baby with the intentional
bath water. On my view, however, this account of
cognitive psychology was seriously mistaken. The
cognitive psychology of the 1970s and early 1980s was
not positing contentful intentional states, nor was it
(adverting) to content in its generalisations. Rather, I
maintained, the cognitive psychology of the day was
"really a kind of logical syntax (only psychologized).
Moreover, it seemed to me that there were good reasons
why cognitive psychology not only did not but SHOULD not
traffic in intentional states. One of these reasons was
provided by the Autonomy argument.'
Stephen P. Stich (1991)
Narrow Content meets Fat Syntax
in MEANING IN MIND - Fodor And His Critics
and writing with others in 1991, even more dramatically:
'In the psychological literature there is no dearth of
models for human belief or memory that follow the lead
of commonsense psychology in supposing that
propositional modularity is true. Indeed, until the
emergence of connectionism, just about all psychological
models of propositional memory, except those urged by
behaviorists, were comfortably compatible with
propositional modularity. Typically, these models view a
subject's store of beliefs or memories as an
interconnected collection of functionally discrete,
semantically interpretable states that interact in
systematic ways. Some of these models represent
individual beliefs as sentence like structures - strings
of symbols that can be individually activated by their
transfer from long-term memory to the more limited
memory of a central processing unit. Other models
represent beliefs as a network of labelled nodes and
labelled links through which patterns of activation may
spread. Still other models represent beliefs as sets of
production rules. In all three sorts of models, it is
generally the case that for any given cognitive episode,
like performing a particular inference or answering a
question, some of the memory states will be actively
involved, and others will be dormant......
The thesis we have been defending in this essay is that
connectionist models of a certain sort are incompatible
with the propositional modularity embedded in
commonsense psychology. The connectionist models in
question are those that are offered as models at the
COGNITIVE level, and in which the encoding of
information is widely distributed and subsymbolic. In
such models, we have argued, there are no DISCRETE,
SEMANTICALLY INTERPRETABLE states that play a CAUSAL
ROLE in some cognitive episodes but not others. Thus
there is, in these models, nothing with which the
propositional attitudes of commonsense psychology can
plausibly be identified. If these models turn out to
offer the best accounts of human belief and memory, we
shall be confronting an ONTOLOGICALLY RADICAL theory
change - the sort of theory change that will sustain the
conclusion that propositional attitudes, like caloric
and phlogiston, do not exist.'
W. Ramsey, S. Stich and J. Garon (1991)
Connectionism, eliminativism, and the future of folk
psychology.
The implications here are that progress in applying psychology will be
impeded if psychologists persist in trying to talk about, or use
psychological (intensional) phenomena within a framework (evidential
behaviourism) which inherently resists quantification into such
terms. Without bound, extensional predicates, we can not reliably use
the predicate calculus, and without the predicate (functional)
calculus we can not formulate lawful relationships, statistical or
determinate.
--
David Longley
ENTICY1
>why do we constantly waist time and precious energy trying to define our
>consciousness
>with our consciousness.
Would you suggest we do so with the lack of consciousness of a fly?
>a fly in a jar does not know it is in a jar, only
>that the
>world is a little smaller.
It doesn't even know that. It just knows it can't fly as far.
It will keep trying to fly farther until it gets tired of flying.. Not
trying.
>live now, there is no past...there is no future. LIVE NOW.
And if you wish to ignore the memory of the past and ignore the potential
of the
future then you will live life with your head pointed down so as to see
where you are and will forever be knocking it against the most simple of
obstructions. Reason.
Oliver Sparrow
>
> In article <82731386...@chatham.demon.co.uk>, Oliver Sparrow
> <oh...@chatham.demon.co.uk> writes:
>
> Let me try to be very direct here. In a digital computer concepts are
> re-presented by bits and bytes. They are concepts only because the
> assembly has order. Why would you think the brain functions differently? I
> am not saying there are bits or bytes of data in the brain and it is NOT
> binary... what I am saying is that it is not hard for you to comprehend
> that a man made system of computation uses representational methods for
> replication yet at the same time you will declare that the brain uses what
> can be observed as the method of storage or computation. That is absurd.
I do not, I fear, understand your syntax, let alone your point. If a neural
network, a linear or digital filter, an active Bayesian model detect a pattern and
switch on a light, then they are all doing the same thing, detecting a paterns.
Binary or other forms of internal bureaucracy have no relevance to the task.
> (red+symmetry) is
>
> Wait a minute here...... symmetry is a concept. Would you declare that
> your computer store symmetry?
Of course a computer can recognise symmetry: it is a basic property of
pattern recogition. A linear regression recognises symmetry in data,
artificial vision in images...... and so forth. Symmetry is theeasiest thing to
train into a neural network. And so forth.
> If you remember..... the same element (the neuron) has to accomplish many
> different tasks. That would logically mean that the tasks would be
> convertible regardless of what their outcome would appear to make them the
> internal processing procedure must be identicle, so is the memory form.
the same transistor in my Pentium is doing lots of tasks (but only with a very
constrained repertoire of actions). So what?
_________________________________________________
Oliver Sparrow
oh...@chatham.demon.co.uk
ENTICY1
<oh...@chatham.demon.co.uk> writes:
Whats the point? You can't separate the computer from its programming. You
can't separate the method from its intention. Continue.. I will not
bother you again.
its not worth it.
David Yeo
> In article <Pine.SOL.3.91.960320073450.4351C-100000@tortoise>
> dyeo@tortoise "David Yeo" writes:
> >
> > David, I would be careful about over generalising re: "the methodology of
> > Cognitive Science". Fodor's obfuscations are but one methodology, and in
> > the view of a growing number of cognitive scientists a very implausible
> > one, employed by Cognitive Science. It is more appropriately viewed as
> > one extreme on the continuum of methodologies
> >
> Well, I think I have been as careful as I should be given the history
> and sorry state of psychology today. I have presented the following
> exract before, but it may help to present it again given the context
> of recent discussions.
First, it is a mistake to equate cognitive science with psychology. Even
worst, you are equating it with a subset of psychology (e.g. it seems you
are intent on distinguishing behaviourism from psychology).
Cognitive science is a composite discipline which, with psychology,
includes artificial intelligence (both traditional and connectionist),
philosophy, and neurophysiology, to note but three of its sub-disciplines.
It is an attempt to break down the kind of barriers you seem intent on
erecting. That is, cognitive science was born out of the realization that
the various cognitive sciences tend to keep re-inventing the wheel. Case
in point: associationism, behaviourism, and connectionism.
<snip>
>
> It is the subject of this article that the solution to this problem
> renders psychology and behaviour science two very different subjects
> with entirely different methods and domains of application. The
> problem is reflected in differences in how language treats certain
> classes of terms. One class is the 'extensional' and the other
> 'intensional'. This article therefore sets out the relevant
You present a false dichotomy. The intensional-extensional distinction
does not serve to distinguish psychology from behaviour theory. For not
all psychology is intensional, nor is all behaviour theory extensional
(witness Tolman). In fact, behaviour theory is riddled with both
hypothetical constructs and intervening variables (see Zuriff, G.E.(1985),
"Behaviourism: A Conceptual Reconstruction" for an excellent discussion of
this point). Moreover, as Quine (1974) noted in "The Roots of Reference":
"Habits, inculcated by conditioning, are dispositions. The subject,
having learned his lesson, is thereafter disposed to make the response
in question whenever activated by the stimulus in question." (p. 4).
Put more formally, conditioning establishes within an organism what Carnap
referred to as a reductive chain:
S1(A) --> [R1 iff T(A)]
S2(A) --> [R2 iff T(A)]
...
Sn(A) --> [Rn iff T(A)]
where S(i) are the triggering stimuli, and R(i) the resulting response,
given that the organism is currently in state T(A). To again quote Quine:
"I am with Carnap in not settling for definition of dispositions by
the intensional idiom. Unlike Carnap, however, I am not concerned to
establish the disposition idiom as a technical idiom of scientific
theory at all, either by hook or by crook: either by definition or by
'meaning postulate.' ... Where the general dispositional idiom has its
use is as follows. By means of it we can refer to a hypothetical state
or mechanism that we do not yet understand, or to any of various such
states and mechanisms, while merely specifying one of its characteristic
effects, such as dissolution upon immersion in water." (ibid, p. 10)
And later [emphasis added]:
"The attribution of a behavioural disposition, learned or unlearned, is
a physiological hypothesis, however fragmentary. It is the *assumption*
of some physiological arrangement such that, if we were ever to succeed
in identifying and analysing it, we should arrive at a satisfactory
understanding of the mechanism of the animal behaviour in question. ... I
once expressed my view by saying that *a disposition term is a promissory
note* for an eventual description in mechanical terms." (ibid, pp. 13-14)
Like you, I am both a behaviourist and a Quinean. And like you I find the
intensional idiom wanting. But unlike you, I argue that where "folk"
psychology (NOT to be confused with all psychology) falls short is that it
takes intentional descriptions as the end point, rather than the starting
point, of more scientifically palatable explanations of behaviour.
David Longley
> Right. We are less constrained by our DNA than are other species.
> That means we have to look somewhere other than DNA to find the
> source of behavior control.
>
It's an *asumption* that we are less constrained.. If you follow my line of
analysis, you will see that we just are not yet aware enought of the degree
to which our physiology consrains and dictates our behaviour. We shove
mentalistic accounts inside our heads and give ourselves lofty psychological
skills to the extent that we donlt yet understand our behavour. Our grasp
of other animals' constraints is largely a function of our ability to be
less romantic about them!
> > We should look more to our basic structure
> >*and* the information "out there" rather than what we conjecture may be
> >inside the head.
>
> The information "out there" is quite important. But it is only
> important because what is "in the head" is able to interpret it.
>
Nonsense - there's no need for "interpretation", just different behaviour
given different conditions!
What you don't realise is that you explain nothing by shoving these fictions
inside heads, it just disracts you from looking for the controlling factors.
It stops one from behaving like a scientist.
--
David Longley
Neil Rickert
>In article <4irvvu$5...@mp.cs.niu.edu> ric...@cs.niu.edu "Neil Rickert" writes:
>> Right. We are less constrained by our DNA than are other species.
>> That means we have to look somewhere other than DNA to find the
>> source of behavior control.
>It's an *asumption* that we are less constrained.. If you follow my line of
>analysis, you will see that we just are not yet aware enought of the degree
>to which our physiology consrains and dictates our behaviour. We shove
>mentalistic accounts inside our heads and give ourselves lofty psychological
>skills to the extent that we donlt yet understand our behavour. Our grasp
>of other animals' constraints is largely a function of our ability to be
>less romantic about them!
It is my assumption that we are less constrained. You assume otherwise.
I suggest we put it to the test. It is known that human DNA varies only
small amount from chimpanzee DNA. If your thesis is correct, then the
amount of variety in human behavior should not differ much from the
amount of variety in chimpanzee behavior.
I don't think we need to actually carry out the test. The variety of
human behavior is well known, and contradicts your assumptions.
>> > We should look more to our basic structure
>> >*and* the information "out there" rather than what we conjecture may be
>> >inside the head.
>> The information "out there" is quite important. But it is only
>> important because what is "in the head" is able to interpret it.
>Nonsense - there's no need for "interpretation", just different behaviour
>given different conditions!
If you want to declare that your own head is empty, that is up to
you. I cannot deny that some of your postings give that
impression. :-)
>What you don't realise is that you explain nothing by shoving these fictions
>inside heads, it just disracts you from looking for the controlling factors.
I am not shoving any fictions inside heads. It explains nothing to
presume that heads are empty, when they obviously are not.
David Longley
>
> It is my assumption that we are less constrained. You assume otherwise.
> I suggest we put it to the test. It is known that human DNA varies only
> small amount from chimpanzee DNA. If your thesis is correct, then the
> amount of variety in human behavior should not differ much from the
> amount of variety in chimpanzee behavior.
>
> I don't think we need to actually carry out the test. The variety of
> human behavior is well known, and contradicts your assumptions.
People used to comment on how all 'blacks' were alike, and that they were
"soul-less"!! (some people still believe such folk psychologically inspired
nonsense). Wes still see this sort of thing happenning today!
Many zoologists would say that the genes which determine the anatomy of
the chimp's pelvis, and their lack of vocal cords, accounts for a lot!
Neil.....our significant diversity dates back in only 1000s of years..
We owe a lot to a very few people's lucky insights.
>
> I am not shoving any fictions inside heads. It explains nothing to
> presume that heads are empty, when they obviously are not.
>
>
I didn't say heads were empty! I said you keep shoving fictions in there.
Yu have NO, I repeat NO evidence that we need do so.
--
David Longley
David Longley
where works needs to be done. To the extent that we include them *as*
elements of our scientific knowledge we are poluting our knowledge base.
Now this is really quite a subtle, and radical point. It's like saying,
where people are muttering about 'demonic possesion', 'rain gods' etc,
there's the place to do science from the "extensional stance".
Now what most psychologists and "cognitive scientists" are doing, is just
becomming super-folk psyhcologists - if you look closely and carefully.
Where I would further (constructively I hope) disagree with you is where
you treat historical notions as if they are legitimate and useful elements
of theory in behaviour science. You would't include notions from 15th or even
19th century physics as elements of contemporary theory. This has a lot to do
with the non-cumulative nature of research in psychology. I refer you to
a couple of raher good articles by Meehl (1967;1978) in the context of the
sorry state of research *methodology* in psychology and cognitive science.
A methodology which is, as I have said elsewhere, explcitly *intensional*,
and therefore no methodology at all.
As briefly mentioned in earlier sections, over recent years, there
have been some moves to introduce formal 'Cognitive Skills' programmes
both in the Canadian Correctional System (Porporino et. al. 1991) and
more recently, within the English system. Empirical studies to date
have focused on very small numbers in treatment and 'comparison'
groups, and have produced equivocal results when the dependent
variable is taken as reconviction rate.
In brief, based on the published data, efficacy of the Canadian
Cognitive Skills Training can not be described as robust, nor can it
be said that the programme's content per se significantly influences
recidivism. The objective here is not to be negative, there may be
further unpublished evidence which puts the programme in a more
favourable light. However, I think it important to point out that on
the basis of the evidence reported in the Porporino et al (1991) paper
we should look at the claims made for the efficacy of the Cognitive
Skills programme with a degree of caution. The published results can
in fact be taken to suggest something equally positive if considered
from the alternative perspective of Sentence Management.
The Porporino et al. paper suggests that those who are motivated to
change (those who volunteered) did almost as well as those who
actually participate in the Cognitive Skills programme. If this is
true, it would seem to be further justification for adopting the
Attainment based Sentence Management system as an infrastructure for
Inmate Programmes. If further evidence can be drawn upon to
substantiate the published claims for the efficacy of 'Cognitive
Skills', that evidence could be used to vindicate the proposed
strategy of an integrated use of the natural demands of all activities
and routines to inculcate new skills in social behaviour and problem
solving. Sentence Management is designed to provide the Service with a
means of integrating all of the currently used assessment systems in
use across activities. It is important to appreciate that the criteria
it looks to assess inmates with respect to, are the very criteria
which activity supervisors are already using to assess inmates, be
these NVQ Performance Criteria, or the 'can do' statements of an RSA
english course. Attainment Criteria per se, can not therefore be
dismissed lightly. The Sentence Management system is designed to
enable staff throughout the system to pull together assessment
material in a common format, it has not been designed to ask anything
new of such staff, although they can add additional criteria to those
they already use if they wish.
Effective programmes must produce evidence of behaviour change, and
not merely self-report, ie verbal behaviour change. We require
measures of attainment with respect to the preset skill levels which
programme staff have been contracted to deliver. All programmes must
have predetermined goals or objectives and these can be specified
independently of any participating inmates. If there is evidence that
the special programmes approach has special merit which excludes them
from the remarks made so far (which, from the review of programmes
below must be viewed with caution), we should not lose sight of the
fact that special programmes are likely to be seen as treatment
programmes, and that they can only occupy inmates for a small
proportion of their time in custody. If there is evidence to justify
the efficacy of special programmes addressing how inmates think, we
should look carefully to what education and other skill based
programmes are designed to deliver. There is much to be said for
adopting an approach to inmate programmes which is education, rather
than treatment based, and one which looks to all that the regime has
to offer as an infrastructure.
The following is how the Canadian group describe the objectives of
their 'Cognitivist' approach:
'The basic assumption of the cognitive model is that the
offender's thinking should be a primary target for
offender rehabilitation. Cognitive skills, acquired
either through life experience or through intervention,
may serve to help the individual relate to his
environment in a more socially adaptive fashion and
reduce the chances of adopting a pattern of criminal
conduct.
Such a conceptualization of criminal behaviour has
important implications for correctional programming. It
suggests that offenders who are poorly equipped
cognitively to cope successfully must be *taught* rather
than *treated*. It suggests that emphasis be placed on
teaching offenders social competence by focusing on:
thinking skills, problem-solving and decision making;
general strategies for recognizing problems, analysing
them, conceiving alternative non-criminal solutions to
them;
ways of thinking logically, objectively and rationally
without overgeneralizing, distorting facts, or
externalizing blame;
calculating the consequences of their behaviour - to
stop and think before they act;
to go beyond an egocentric view of the world and
comprehend and consider the thoughts and feelings of
other people;
to improve interpersonal problem-solving skills and
develop coping behaviours which can serve as effective
alternatives to anti-social or criminal behaviour;
to view frustrations as problem-solving tasks and not
just as personal threats;
to develop a self-regulatory system so that their pro-
social behaviour is not dependent on external control.
to develop beliefs that they can control their life;
that what happens to them depends in large measure on
their thinking and the behaviour it leads to.
To date we have been able to examine the outcome of 40
offenders who had been granted some form of conditional
release and were followed up in the community for at
least six months. On average, the follow up period was
19.7 months. We also gathered information on the outcome
of a comparison group of 23 offenders who were selected
for Cognitive Skills Training but had not participated.
These offenders did not differ from the program
participants on a number of characteristics and were
followed-up for a comparable period of time.
.....offenders in the treatment group were re-admitted
for new convictions at a lower rate that the comparison
group during the follow-up period. Specifically, only
20% of the treatment group were re-admitted for new
convictions compared to 30% of the offenders in the
comparison group. It is interesting to note that the
number of offenders who were returned to prison without
new convictions (eg technical violations, day-parole
terminations) is similar yet marginally larger in the
treatment group. It is possible that the Cognitive
Skills Training participants may be subjected to closer
monitoring because of expectations regarding the
program.'
F. Porporino, L. Fabiano and Robinson
Focusing on Successful Reintegration:Cognitive Skills
Training for Offenders - July 1991
The authors tell us that seven of the 23 in the comparison group were
reconvicted for a new offence, whilst eight of the 40 offenders in the
treatment group were reconvicted for a new offence. However, looking
at returns to prison for violations of parole etc., the authors say:
'It is interesting to note that the number of offenders who were
returned to prison without new convictions (eg technical violations,
day-parole terminations) is similar yet marginally larger in the
treatment group'.
Furthermore, when the authors compared the predicted reconviction rate
(52%) for these groups with the actual rates (20% and 30% for the
treatment and comparison groups respectively) the low rate of
reconviction in the comparison group led them to conclude:
'motivation for treatment in end of itself may be
influential in post-release success'.
In fact, the conclusion can be stated somewhat more strongly. Imagine
this was a drugs trial. The comparison group, like the treatment
group are all volunteers. They all wanted to be in the programme, they
all, effectively, wanted to take the tablets. Some, however, didn't
get to join the programme, they didn't 'get to take the tablets', but
other than that did not differ from the treatment group. In the
Porporino study, those inmates comprised the comparison group. When
the reconviction data came in, it showed that those in the comparison
group were pretty much like those in the treatment group. The
treatment, ie 'the Cognitive Skills' training, had virtually no
effect. The comparison group is remarkably like the treatment group in
not being reconvicted for a new offence. In fact, if five of the
comparison group had reconvicted rather than seven, the reconviction
rate would have been the same (20%) for both groups.
TREATMENT COMPARISON
Readmissions with New Convictions 20% 30.4%
(8/40) (7/23)
Readmissions without New Convictions 25% 21.7%
(10/40) (5/23)
No Readmissions 55% 47.9%
(22/40) (11/23)
Apart from the fact that the numbers being analysed are extremely
small, the fact that the authors take these figures to justify
statements that Cognitive Skills, ie an intensive 8-12 week course,
focusing on what inmates 'think', a course that focuses apparently on
changing 'attitudes' rather than 'teaching new/different behaviours',
is causally efficacious in bringing about reductions in recidivism is
questionable. The comparison group it must be appreciated, were all
volunteers, only differing from the treatment group in that they did
not get to participate in the programme. But only 30% of them (7/23)
were reconvicted for a new offence, compared to 20% (8/40) in the
treatment group. Compared to the expected reconviction rate for those
in either group (52%) might reasonably be led to the conclusion that
those in the comparison group did very well compared to those who
actually participated in the programme. The above pattern of results
casts some doubt as to how important the content of the Cognitive
Skills Programme was at all. The fact that the percentages in the 'No
Readmissions' and the 'Readmissions Without New Reconvictions' lends
support to this view.
These (Canadian) studies have also presented evidence for short term
longitudinal changes in 'Cognitive Skills' performance for those
participating in the programme (and somewhat surprisingly, sometimes
in the comparison groups). These changes may however be comparable in
kind to the changes observed in the more formal education studies
surveyed by Nisbett et al. (1987). The whole notion of formal training
in abstract 'Cognitive Skills' might in fact be profitably critically
evaluated in the context of such research programmes, along with the
more substantial body of research into the heuristics and biases of
natural human judgment ('commonsense') in the absence of
distributional data. Other studies, e.g. McDougall, Barnett, Ashurst
and Willis (1987), although more sensitive to some of the
methodological constraints in evaluating such programs, still give
much greater weight to their conclusions than seems warranted by
either the design of their study or their actual data. For instance,
in the above study, an anger control course resulted in a
'significant' difference in institutional reports in a three month
follow up period at the p<0.05 level using a sign test. However, apart
from methodological problems, acknowledged by the authors, the
suggestion that the *efficacious component* was cognitive must, in the
light of the arguments of Meehl and others below, on the simple logic
of hypothesis testing, be surely be seen to be indefensible. On the
basis of their design, one might, cautiously, suggest that there is
some evidence that participating in the programme had some effect
(possibly, as p<0.05), but precisely what it was within the course
which was efficacious can not be said given the design of the study.
As readers will come to appreciate, this is a pervasive problem in
social science research, and is yet another example of 'going beyond
the information given'. The force of Meehl's and Lakatos' arguments in
the light of such failures to refrain from inductive speculation on
the basis of minimal evidence should not be treated lightly. It is a
problem which has reached epidemic proportions in psychology as many
of the leading statisticians now lament (Guttman 1985, Cohen 1990),
the above studies are in fact quite representative of the general
failure of psychologists as a group to appreciate the limits of the
propositional as opposed to the predicate calculus as a basis for
their methodology. Most of the designs of experiments adopted do not
allow researchers to draw the conclusions that they do from their
studies. In the above study, the best one could say is that behaviour
improved for those inmates who participated in a program. Logically,
one simply cannot say more.
At the same time that 'Cognitive Skills' programmes are being
developed in the English Prison system, an attempt is being made to
introduce a naturalistic approach to behavioural skill development,
and assessment, 'cognitive skills' being but one class of these
behaviours. Such skills are generally taught within education, as
elements of particular VTC CIT courses or even some of the domestic
activities such as wing cleaning. This is the system of 'Sentence
Management' which looks to inculcate skills under the relatively
natural conditions of inmate activities and the day to day routines.
Through a combination of continuous assessment of behaviour, target
negotiation and contracting and apposite allocation of inmates, the
system aims to maximise transfer of skills acquisition by *teaching for
transfer* (Gladstone 1989) and compensating for deficits.
The Methodological Plight of Intensional (Cognitive) Psychology
Inductive inferential technology par excellence, ie Neyman-Pearson
hypothesis testing, or more accurately, conclusions drawn from using
that technology, has not been without its critics, and it is on this
point that we end this section. The conclusion to be drawn from the
following may well be that the most valuable contribution of
specialists are their skills in deductive rather than inductive logic.
Rather than training staff in the use of heuristics, we should perhaps
be providing them with specific formal roles, ie functions, which
require the practice of formal deductive skills. Here is how Meehl
(1978) reviewed the standard (inductive) methodological approach
adopted by most psychologists:
'I suggest to you that Sir Ronald has befuddled us,
mesmerised us, and led us down the primrose path. I
believe that the most universal reliance on merely
refuting the null hypothesis as the standard method for
corroborating substantive theories in the soft areas is
a terrible mistake, is basically unsound, poor
scientific strategy, and one of the worst things that
ever happened in the history of psychology'.
P. E. Meehl
Theoretical Risks and Tabular Asterisks:
Sir Karl and Sir Ronald and The Slow Progress of Soft Psychology.
J Consulting and Clinical Psychology 1978,45,4,p806-34
The contrasting approach of point prediction refutation is the
falsificationism of Sir Karl (Popper). In 1967, Meehl made the point
very clearly:
'I conclude that the effect of increased precision,
whether achieved by improved instrumentation and
control, greater sensitivity in the logical structure of
the experiment, or increasing the number of
observations, is to yield a probability approaching 1/2
of corroborating our substantive theory by a
significance test, *even if the theory is totally
without merit*. That is to say, the ordinary result of
improving our experimental methods and increasing our
sample size, proceeding in accordance with the
traditionally accepted method of theory-testing by
refuting a directional null hypothesis, yields a prior
probability = 1/2 and very likely somewhat above that
value by an unknown amount. It goes without saying that
successfully negotiating and experimental hurdle of this
sort can constitute only an extremely weak corroboration
of any substantive theory, quite apart from currently
disputed issues of the Bayesian type regarding the
assignment of prior probabilities to the theory itself.
So far as I am able to discern, this methodological
truth is either unknown or systematically ignored by
most behaviour scientists. I do not know to what extent
this is attributable to confusion between the
substantive theory T and the statistical hypothesis H1,
with the resulting mis-assignment of the probability (1-
p) complementary to the significance level p attained,
to the "probability" of the substantive theory; or to
what extent it arises from insufficient attention to the
truism that the point-null hypothesis H0 is [quasi]
always false. It seems unlikely that most social science
investigators would think in their usual way about a
theory in meteorology which "successfully predicted"
that it would rain on the 17th of April, given the
antecedent information that it rains (on the average)
during half the days in the month of April.
But this is not the worst of the story. Inadequate
appreciation of the extreme weakness of the test to
which a substantive theory T is subjected by merely
predicting a directional statistical difference d > 0 is
then compounded by a truly remarkable failure to
recognize the logical asymmetry between, on the one
hand, (formally invalid) "confirmation" of a theory via
affirming the consequent in an argument of form [T > H1,
H1, infer T], & on the other hand the deductively tight
REFUTATION of the theory *modus tollens* by a falsified
prediction, the logical form being: [T > H1, ~H1, infer
~T].
While my own philosophical predilections are somewhat
Popperian, I dare say any reader will agree that no
full-fledged Popperian philosophy of science is
presupposed in what I have just said. The destruction of
a theory *modus tollens* is, after all, a matter of
deductive logic; whereas that the "confirmation" of a
theory by its making successful predictions involves a
much weaker kind of inference. This much would be
conceded by even the most anti-Popperian "inductivist".
The writing of behavior scientists often reads as though
they assumed - what it is hard to believe anyone would
explicitly assert if challenged - that successful and
unsuccessful predictions are practically on all fours in
arguing for and against a substantive theory.'
P. E. Meehl (1967)
Theory Testing in Psychology and Physics: A Methodological Paradox.
Philosophy of Science, p.111-2 June 1967
Rozeboom (1960), Bolles (1962), Bakan (1966) and Lykken (1968) made
similar points throughout the 1960s. Cohen (1990), in a remarkably
well written paper reviewed the dire situation as follows:
'Over the years, I have learned not to make errors of
the following kinds:
When a Fisherian null hypothesis is rejected with an
associated probability of, for example, .026, it is
*not* the case that the probability that the null
hypothesis is true is .026 (or less than .05, or any
other value we can specify). Given our framework of
probability as long-run relative frequency -as much as
we might wish it to be otherwise - this result does not
tell us about the truth of the null hypothesis, given
the data. (For this we have to go to Bayesian or
likelihood statistics, in which probability is not
relative frequency but degree of belief.) What it tells
us is the probability of the data, given the truth of
the null hypothesis - which is not the same thing, as
much as it may sound like it.
If the p value with which we reject the Fisherian null
hypothesis does not tell us the probability that the
null hypothesis is true, it certainly cannot tell us
anything about the probability that the *research* or
alternative hypothesis is true. In fact, there *is* no
alternate hypothesis in Fisher's scheme: Indeed, he
violently opposed its inclusion by Neyman and Pearson.
Despite widespread misconceptions to the contrary, the
rejection of a given null hypothesis gives us no basis
for estimating the probability that a replication of the
research will again result in rejecting that null
hypothesis.
Of course, everyone knows that failure to reject the
Fisherian null hypothesis does not warrant the
conclusion that it is true. Fisher certainly knew and
emphasized it, and our textbooks duly so instruct us.
Yet how often do we read in the discussion and
conclusions of articles now appearing in our most
prestigious journals that "there is no difference" or
"no relationship"?
The other side of this coin is the interpretation that
accompanies results that surmount the .05 barrier and
achieve the state of grace of "statistical
significance". "Everyone" knows that all this means is
that the effect is not nil, and nothing more. Yet how
often do we see such a result to be taken to mean, at
least implicitly, that the effect is *significant*, that
is, *important, large*. If a result is *highly*
significant, say p<0.001, the temptation to make this
misinterpretation becomes all but irresistible.
Let's take a close look at this null hypothesis - the
fulcrum of the Fisherian scheme - that we so earnestly
seek to negate. A null hypothesis is any precise
statement about a state of affairs in a population,
usually the value of a parameter, frequently 0. It is
called a "null" hypothesis because it means "nothing
doing". Thus, "The difference in the mean score of U.S.
men and women on an Attitude Toward the U.N. scale is
zero" is a null hypothesis. "The product-moment r
between height and IQ in high school students is zero"
is another. "The proportion of men in a population of
adult dyslexics is .50" is yet another. Each is a
precise statement - for example, if the population r
between height and IQ is in fact .03, the null
hypothesis that it is zero is false. It is also false if
the r is .01, .001, or .000001!.
A little thought reveals a fact widely understood by
statisticians: The null hypothesis, taken literally (and
that's the only way you can take it in formal hypothesis
testing), is always false in the real world. It can only
be true in the bowels of a computer processor running a
Monte carlo study (and even then a stray electron may
make it false. If it is false, even to a tiny degree, it
must be the case that a large enough sample will produce
a significant result and lead to its rejection. So if
the null hypothesis is always false, what's the big deal
about rejecting it?'
J. Cohen (1990)
What I Have Learned (So Far)
American Psychologist, Dec 1990 p.1307-1308
Lykken (1968) had simply pointed out:
'Most theories in the areas of personality, clinical,
and social psychology predict no more than the direction
of a correlation, group difference, or treatment effect.
Since the null hypothesis is never strictly true, such
predictions have about a 50-50 chance of being confirmed
by experiment when the theory in question is false,
since the statistical significance of the result is a
function of the sample size.'
It is this contrast between testing, ie falsifying, a
theory or hypothesis by such a weak criterion as the
above, compared to making point predictions (testing
conjunctions of statements by modus tollens) as Popper
urges that led Meehl to write his paper on Theoretical
Risks and Tabular Asterisks in 1978, lamenting on the
slow progress in soft psychology which is the
consequence of not appreciating how weak a test the
Neyman-Pearson actually procedure is.'
But perhaps the worst of it that although Cohen (1962)
undertook a power (power=1-beta, where beta is the
likelihood of a type II error) survey of the articles in
the 1960 volume of the Journal of Abnormal and Social
Psychology in which he found that the median power to
detect a medium effect size under representative
conditions was only .46 (ie worse than chance),
Sedlmeier and Gigerenzer (1989) published a paper
entitled "Do studies of Statistical Power Have an Effect
on the Power of Studies." in which they replicated the
study on the 1984 Journal of abnormal Psychology and
found that the median power under the same conditions
was .44, a little worse than the original .46. Apart
from no improvement over the years, and providing
substantial empirical evidence for what Lakatos has to
say below, what does this mean? Cohen had this to say:
'When I finally stumbled onto power analysis, and
managed to overcome the handicap of a background with no
working math beyond high school algebra (to say nothing
of mathematical statistics), it was as if I had died and
gone to heaven. After I learned what noncentral
distributions were and figured out that it was important
to decompose noncentrality parameters into their
constituents of effect size and sample size; I realized
that I had a framework for hypothesis testing that had
four parameters; the alpha significance criterion, the
sample size, the population effect size, and the power
of the test. For any statistical test, any one of these
was a function of the other three. This meant for
example, that for a significance test of a product-
moment correlation, using a two-sided .05 alpha
criterion and a sample size of 50 cases, if the
population correlation is .30, my long-run probability
of rejecting the null hypothesis and finding the sample
correlation to be significant was .57, a coin flip. As
another example, for the same alpha=.05 and population
r=0.30, if I want to have .80 power, I could determine
that I needed a sample size of 85.'
J. Cohen (1990) p.1308
And this was Lakatos' earlier conclusion:
'The requirement of continuous growth...hits patched-up,
unimaginative series of pedestrian "empirical"
adjustments which are so frequent, for instance in
modern social psychology. Such adjustments may, with the
help of so-called "statistical techniques" make some
"novel" predictions and may even conjure up some
irrelevant grains of truth in them. But this theorising
has no unifying idea, no heuristic power, no continuity.
They do not add up to a genuine research programme and
are on the whole, worthless..
After reading Meehl (1967) and Lykken (1968) one wonders
whether the function of statistical techniques in the
social sciences is not primarily to provide a machinery
for producing phoney corroborations and thereby a
semblance of "scientific progress" where, in fact, there
is nothing but an increase in pseudo-intellectual
garbage.'
I Lakatos (1978) p88-9
Falsification and the methodology of scientific research programs
The Methodology of Scientific Research Programs: Imre Lakatos
philosophical papers (vol 1 pp 139-67) Eds. Worrall & Currie.
Guttman (1976;1985) has made similar remarks within the professional
statistical literature:
'Many practitioners have become disillusioned with
declarative inference, especially that of hypothesis
testing. For example, according to Carver 'statistical
significance testing has involved more fantasy than
fact. The emphasis on statistical significance over
scientific significance in education and research
represents a corrupt form of the scientific method.
Educational research would be better off if it stopped
testing its results for statistical significance'. The
'significance' testing referred to here is largely
according to Neyman-Pearson theory. We shall marshall
arguments against such testing, leading to the
conclusion that it be abandoned by all substantive
science and not just by educational research and other
social sciences which have begun to raise voices against
the virtual tyranny of this branch of inference in the
academic world.'
L. Guttman (1985)
The Illogic of Statistical Inference for Cumulative Science
Applied Stochastic Models and Data Analysis Vol 1, 3-10
Things have not changed much recently:
'It is not at all clear why researchers continue to
ignore power analysis. The passive acceptance of this
state of affairs by editors and reviewers is even more
of a mystery. At least part of the problem may be the
low level of consciousness about effect size: It is as
if the only concern about magnitude in much
psychological research is with regard to the statistical
test result and its accompanying p value, not with
regard to the psychological phenomenon under study.'
J. Cohen (1992)
A Power Primer: Quantitative Methods in Psychology:
Psychological Bulletin 112,1,155-159
If not via the classic, albeit 'hybrid' (Gigerenzer 1993), methodology
of inductive inferential hypothesis testing, what practical form can a
naturalistic science and technology of behaviour take? The solution
being urged in the PROBE project is a) historical, b) descriptive and
c) deductive. It requires psychologists to simply record and
extensionally analyse a history of behaviour (including 'de dicto'
content-clauses) categorised according to finite reference classes
(specific valid values) in conjunction with dates, times and
locations. In effect, to adopt a Quinean (1960,1992), Observation
Statement/Observation Categorical testing, and relational approach to
the analysis of behaviour. The majority of staff employed by the
Prison Service are already performing tasks which could be classed as
work in behaviour management. However, what is required is a service
in behaviour analysis using behaviour science and technology. If
psychologists limited themselves to recording and analysing behaviour
*as functions of the regime* in which they occur (Ross and Nisbett
1991), the Service would have an effective science and technology of
behaviour, and a clear framework for both recruitment and staff
training. In recent years, a good number of academics have recommended
some such approach. Cohen (1990) for instance had the following to
say:
'Despite my career-long identification with statistical
inference, I believe, together with such luminaries as
Meehl (1978), Tukey (1977), and Gigerenzer (Gigerenzer
and Murray 1987), that hypothesis testing has been
greatly overemphasized in psychology and in the other
disciplines that use it. It has diverted our attention
from crucial issues. Mesmerized by a single all-purpose,
mechanized, "objective" ritual in which we convert
numbers into other numbers and get a yes-no answer, we
have come to neglect close scrutiny of where the numbers
came from....So, how should I use statistics in
psychological research? First of all, descriptively.
John Tukey's (1977) Exploratory Data Analysis is an
inspiring account of how to effect graphic and numerical
analyses of the data at hand so as to understand them.
The techniques, although subtle in conception, are
simple in application, requiring no more than paper and
pencil (Tukey says if you have a hand-held calculator,
fine).......he manages to fill 700 pages with techniques
of "mere" description, pointing out in the preface that
the emphasis on inference in modern statistics has
resulted in a loss of flexibility in data analysis.'
J. Cohen (1990) American Psychologist Dec p.1310
As Gigerenzer (1987, 1988, 1993) has pointed out, some of the
bewilderment one experiences in teaching statistics mentioned at the
beginning of this volume can be accounted for by Latent Inhibition,
i.e. students have largely been *badly taught* as undergraduates. In
1986, Meehl proposed a thesis which he urges us to take literally:
'Thesis: Owing to the abusive reliance upon significance
testing - rather than point or interval estimation,
curve shape, or ordination - in the social sciences, the
usual article summarizing the state of the evidence on a
theory (such as appears in the Psychological Bulletin)
is nearly useless.....I think it is scandalous that
editors still accept manuscripts in which the author
presents tables of significance tests without giving
measures of overlap or such basic descriptive statistics
as might enable the reader to do rough computations,
from means and standard deviations presented, as to what
the overlap is.'
P. E. Meehl (1986)
What Social Scientists Don't Understand
in Metatheory in Social Science: Eds D. W. Fiske & R. A.
Shweder p.325
However, the main difficulty lies perhaps in the context specificity
of all learning, - the failure of Leibniz's Law within epistemic
contexts. In the Sentence Management system, such intensionalist
opacity is averted by making all observations of behaviour relative to
demands of the environment specified under Function 17 of the
Governors Contract, specified a priori, on RM-1s. The analytical and
management technology is declarative, criterion referenced, deductive,
and extensional. Its detailed presentation is deferred to Volume 2
which almost exclusively presents the findings as Tukey box plots and
other descriptive statistics.
As I have said elsewhere, there *is* in my view, a fundamental difference
between *psychology* and *behaviour science*. It is one I am *making*, and
I do so on the basis of what I have observd in my own profession.
--
David Longley
Neil Rickert
>In article <4j4iul$i...@mp.cs.niu.edu> ric...@cs.niu.edu "Neil Rickert" writes:
>> Notice how David must bend and twist. It is called "saving the theory".
>> It is an example of the failure of falsification. No amount of evidence
>> will move David from his convictions, falsificationism to the contrary
>> notwithstanding.
>Have you ever read any of Skinner's work? Try "Beyond Freedom and Dignity"
Yes, I have read that. I was underwhelmed. My respect for Skinner
dropped several notches.
David Longley
> In <827664...@longley.demon.co.uk> David Longley <Da...@longley.demon.co.uk>
> writes:
> >In article <4j1neg$p...@mp.cs.niu.edu> ric...@cs.niu.edu "Neil Rickert" writes:>
> >> It is my assumption that we are less constrained. You assume otherwise.
> >> I suggest we put it to the test. It is known that human DNA varies only
> >> small amount from chimpanzee DNA. If your thesis is correct, then the
> >> amount of variety in human behavior should not differ much from the
> >> amount of variety in chimpanzee behavior.
>
> >> I don't think we need to actually carry out the test. The variety of
> >> human behavior is well known, and contradicts your assumptions.
>
> >People used to comment on how all 'blacks' were alike, and that they were
> >"soul-less"!! (some people still believe such folk psychologically inspired
> >nonsense). Wes still see this sort of thing happenning today!
>
> Right. And if that sort of behavior is encoded in our DNA, how is it
> that some people manage to avoid such behavior today? You only help
> make my case.
>
Through new educational contingencies and social sanctions. However,
that does not mean that such responses have been eradicated, just
controlled somewhat. neophobia, and therefore xenophobia etc are
uncositional responses (they must be) so are always there. We also
tend to over generalize as the Representativeness and availability
heuristic show, and the research, as I have reviewed:
'Fragments of Behaviour: The Extensional Stance'
http://www.uni-hamburg.de/~kriminol/TS/tskr.htm
Are *resistant* to formal education alas. This is a subtle issue, so before
rushing in to exploit this paradox, please read the sections in 'Fragments'
on the teaching of formal reasoning.
> >Many zoologists would say that the genes which determine the anatomy of
> >the chimp's pelvis, and their lack of vocal cords, accounts for a lot!
>
> They probably do account for a lot. But they don't preprogram our
> behavior.
The UCRs of conditioning are not some magical forces whic supervene on
our physiology. They are how our bodies work. prick me with a pin (ceteris
paribus) and I make a noise. make me too hot and I perspire, etc etc.
Feed me sugar and I secrete insulin, after a while, the taste of sugar
will do, as will associated smells. That is all based on how we are
biologically programmed to respond to key elements of our environment.
There are limits to what will serve as a cue, in fascinating ways, and it
is a study of that which I am saying will pay great dividends.
--
David Longley
Ken Ewell
<snip>
>At the heart of 20th century logic there is a very interesting problem
>(illuminated over the last three decades by W.V.O Quine (1956, 1960,
>1990,1992), which seems to be divisive with respect to the
>classification and analysis of 'mental' (or psychological) phenomena
>as opposed to 'physical' phenomena. The problem is variously known as
>Brentano's Thesis (Quine 1960), 'the problem of intensionality', or
>'the content-clause problem'.
And however you distinguish such 'mental' phenomena *in psychological
or behavioral terms* is inconsequential to the basic issues of
recognizing and discerning what is sensible out of the chaos of the
physical phenomena. Quine does not do anything to resolve the apparent
problem. Calling some terms and usages of language intensional and
some extensional does no justice to what "language" really is. If you
assume that "language" is (purely) a psychological phenomena, any
analysis is thus bound-up in psycho-babble and dribble and therefore
results in psycho-babble and dribble; hardly suitable for prescribing
recognition in a machine environment.
Human behavior (imho) is irrelevant (and damaging) to the processes of
unimpeded recognition and mensuration one would hope to achieve with a
suitibly programmed machine.
> "The keynote of the mental is not the mind it is the
> content-clause syntax, the idiom 'that p'".
> W. V. O. Quine
Granted, in the human context, with language psychologically serving a
self-centered and largely uniformed people, the keynote of the mental
may be "that p." In a welll-tuned machine, however, the keynote of
the mental is mensuration.
O.K. Ewell
> Intension
> The Pursuit of Truth (1990) p.71
><Snip...> This article therefore sets out the relevant
>contemporary research background and outlines the practical
>implications which these logical classes have for the applied,
>practical work of criminological psychologists.
Whether cirminological psychologists benefit from Quine's work is
irrelavent to this subject.
<much sniped>
> 'If we are limning the true and ultimate structure of
> reality, the canonical scheme for us is the austere
> scheme that knows no quotation but direct quotation and
> no propositional attitudes but only the physical
> constitution and behavior of organisms.'
> W.V.O Quine
> Word and Object 1960 p 221
It is incredulous to me that philosophers like Quine continue to
assume that there is nothing in the realm of language that lies
outside mental processes and human behavior; that there is nothing in
the institution of speech that may be brought back to the fixed
elements of a nature, immutable as to substance, although variable to
infinity as to forms.
Either you David, and/or Quine also, must have in mind that the only
physical constitution and behavior of organisms that matter in this
purportedly 'ultimate structure of reality' is the "human organisim."
Perhaps this accounts for the title of Quine's book.
Can you not see how the assumption that language is a pyschological
phenomena places anything that follows from it in the realm of
mentalise ideas of semanticisim or pseudosemanticism. Reality has no
"direct" quotation, we cannot reduce reality to a quotation at all.
All we can do is recall the relevant cognates, form a cogent
representation and/or supposition, and discern whether or not there is
any relevance between what is present to the sensibilites, what is in
our present state of mind, and what constitutes our worldview and our
learned experience. Thus, what is direct is what is deemed relevant,
none-the-less marked by a harmony, a balance, and a resonance, or a
lack thereof.
>For:
> 'Once it is shown that a region of discourse is not
> extensional, then according to Quine, we have reason to
> doubt its claim to describe the structure of reality.'
> C. Hookway
> Logic: Canonical Notation and Extensionality
> Quine (1988)
>The problem with intensional (or common sense or 'folk') psychology
>has been clearly spelled out by Nelson (1992):
Well, I guess I see what David Longley is on about. He thinks that
any reference to "common sense" in this subject refers to those bits
of wisdom of folk pyschology that are purportedly based upon common
sense.
David: THIS SUBJECT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THOSE NOTIONS.
> 'The trouble is, according to Brentano's thesis, no such
> theory is forthcoming on strictly naturalistic, physical
> grounds. If you want semantics, you need a full-blown,
> irreducible psychology of intensions.
> <Snip...> In fact intensional words and
> sentences are precisely those expressions in which
> certain key forms of logical inference break down.'
> R. J. Nelson (1992)
> Naming and Reference p.39-42
Noam Chomsky, who is one of the great fathers of modern computational
linguistics, wonders, without reaching ultimate results, about
language fundamentals, "its nature, origin, and use" and complains
that "much of what is misleadingly called the semantics of natural
language ... is not semantics at all, if by semantics we mean THE
STUDY OF THE RELATION BETWEEN LANGUAGE AND THE WORLD... "
(emhaisis added.) "Rather, this work deals with certain postulated
levels of mental representation...;" i.e., pseudosemanticism.
Chomsky, N. (1985). Knowledge of language: Its nature, origin,
and use (pp. 15-50). In Anshen, R.N.(ed.). Convergence. New York:
Praeger.
In considering the problems with understanding computers and
cognition. the research company I work for, Management Information
Technologies, Inc., (MITi,) adopted a theory that is based on physical
grounds, in fact, studying natural language as a natural (physical)
phenomenon.
Winograd and Flores suggested in their work ";A New Foundation for
Design" (1985,) a return to the drawing boards in the area of
"understanding computers and cognition". They argue
there with Heidegger that we become "blind" whenever
we try to observe our own cognitive processes; "because our
view is limited to what can be expressed in the terms we have
adopted."
David Longley is a living example of this.
The approach we took is unique in this aspect: The confusion
surrounding research on natural language and cognitive processes has
been prolonged by the lack of a theory of "real" language semantics.
Such a theory should have the power to explain the relation between
human knowledge --as formulated by language-- and the real world it
refers to. To do so, pseudosemanticism is to be avoided and the
phenomenon of blindness must be prevented from aborting the research
process.
In light of the fact that no theory was forthcomming, we adopted a
theory of our own. Our theory reduces to axioms; the first being that
language is given by nature.
Since we are found to have a restricted view whenever we observe
our cognitive processes, one way to develop a better vision is
to assume that knowledge stems from natural sources disconnected
from us.
This was done by assuming language to be part of nature. The impact
of experience on our view of language can be attenuated by this
assumption if we study language as a source of new information
about a real world containing language as a separate subset. The
relations between language and the real world found on this basis
are free from the blame of pseudosemanticism.
In this way, the semantics postulated by the theory we adopted are
free from the blame of pseudosemanticism. So, we do not need a
"full-blown, irreducible psychology of intensions;" whatever that may
be. None-the-less, the proofs of such things are in the pudding so
to speak. My company has, in fact, devised technology from this
theory and has applied for and received a patent for a mathematical
apparatus and computational methods that are capable of recognizing
and measuring "relations of meaning" (semantics) in and between
linguistic expressions in many different languages
> U. T. Place (1987)
> Skinner Re-Skinned P. 244
> In B.F. Skinner Consensus and Controversy
> Eds. S. Modgil & C. Modgil
> 'If it makes sense to speak of properties, it should
> make clear sense to speak of sameness and differences of
> properties; but it does not. If a thing has this
> property and not that, then certainly this property and
> that are different properties. But what if everything
> that has this property has that one as well, and vice
> versa? Should we say that they are the same property? If
> so, well and good; no problem. But people do not take
> that line.
<snip...> Language has many properties; this no one can deny. It is
foolish to presume that presumed properties, or temporal and arbitrary
classifications or lack thereof, of words, propositions, or other
expressions of human languages, have any effect on the formal and
natural principles of language. And everyone should know by now that
you cannot think of the properties of *language* in this way (George
Lakeoff: Women, Fire and other Dangerous Things:)
> I am told that every creature with a heart
> has kidneys, and vice versa; but who will say that the
> property of having a heart is the same as that of having
> kidneys?
> W. V. O. Quine (1987)
> Classes versus Properties
> QUIDDITIES:
Would you assert that only organisims with mouths and ears are capable
of using language to signal or convey; of course not. Plants do not
have mouths or ears, yet; plants have no observable problems
signalling and conveying what they do to insects and to birds. So if
you speak of properties when discussing what is real, or natural, or
reality, and you include language in the same context, you cannot
exclude other organisms that do exist in the world, do convey messages
in and between species, and do cause behavioral response.
Natural language has little to do with hearts, minds, or kidneys, or
for that matter -- psychologcally-oriented mental processes; natural
language being firmly grounded in natural, physical, principles of
harmony and resonance.
<snip> Irrelevant
>It has been argued quite convincingly by Quine (1956,1960) <snip...> and that
>there can not be a universal language of thought or 'mentalese', since
>such a system would presume determinate translation relations.
>Different languages are different systems of behaviour which may
>achieve similar ends, but they do not support direct, determinate
>translation relations.
This is absurd, completely inaccurate, and incredulous!
My idea is this: Reality or Nature provides "signals" to us, through
a natural language consisting of gestures and/or signs; information,
thus represented. It is translated, but not in the way Longley
reports or Quine supposes. It is a structural translation in the
physical sense of translation (relocation without rotation.) We
imagine and recognize the 'signs' of real objects and things in our
mind, not the objects or things themselves; they are as they are in
reality. But whilst their signs are in our imagination, we can rotate
them, manipulate them, inspect them and measure them from all angles,
and in this way, one may interpret the signs of reality and some
(perhaps unseen) aspects of their relations according to one's own
cognition and awareness. This may explain why there seems to be an
indeterminancy in and between relations when there are, indeed,
determinate relations in nature, in the world, and between it and our
thoughts about it.
Consider this: A Frenchman and an Englishman sit down together at a
table over a cup of coffee, and while they have different names for
these objects in their thus shared reality, no one would claim that
either of them would disagree over what the objects in their reality,
in fact are, or what constitutes their shared reality. We can assume,
in this example, that each man has his own culturally and personally
distinct cognition of the real objects and events present to each of
them and that neither of them speak the other's language.
Now here is the question for Quine or for Longley or both: If the
mentally held ideas for these objects in this reality, do not stem
from cognates for the recognized, discerned, and determinant relations
signaled by the actual (real) objects themselves, on what would you
suppose the two men base their agreement over what they each
independently perceive these objects to be?
Anyway, we have proven a lot of this already with a computational
system that can recognize and discern such relations between messages
and/or whole texts written in any of the Arabic, English, French,
German, Hebrew, Spanish, Swedish, and Russian languages. (U.S. pat.
no. 4,849,898, July 1989)
>This is Quine's (1960) 'Indeterminacy of
>Translation Thesis'. Despite its import, we frequently behave 'as if'
>it is legitimate to directly translate (substitute), and we do this
>not only within our own language as illustrated below, but within our
>own thinking and language.
While I do not know if this is useful for criminal psychology or other
endeavors of behavioral science, this is pure rubbish for the purposes
of this discussion.
<snip> Irrelevant.
>Dretske (1980) put the issue as follows:
> <snip...> The content of a cognitive
> state, and hence the cognitive state itself, depends
> (for its identity) on something beyond the extension or
> reference of the terms we use to express the content. I
> shall say, therefore, that a description of a cognitive
> state, is non-extensional.'
> F. I. Dretske (1980)
> The Intentionality of Cognitive States
> Midwest Studies in Philosophy 5,281-294
One thing the cognitive state depends on is the presence of a cognate.
<snip> Irrelevant.
<snip> Irrelevant
<snip> the balance is also all irrelevant. I cannot conceive of how
one can hold out all of this nonesense as a favorable position for a
scientific perspective over how everyday people of sincere intention
conclude, from their own common sense, what is real, and from their
own experience conclude, what is just and what is unjust, what is true
or faithful, from all of what is nonsensical in the world.
To help to fathom the determinant, indeed, "invariantly determinate,"
nature of the relations, between human knowledge - as forumulated in
the words of human language - and the world, consider for a moment
some timeless work of literature. I trust Shakespeare's Hamlet, will
meet with David Longley's approval:
This was a famous play whose form depicts an illustrious tragedy.
It was performed on the stage of the Globe theater in the 17th
century and it is still viable on the motion picture screens of
the 20th century. It has manifested, speaking the language of
physics, invariance, that is, invariability. It demonstrates the
power of a certain conservation law: the law of the conservation
of the art, conserving the force of its influence upon being displaced
in space/time.
As hard as it may be for you to conceive, language complies with this
law i.e.: While this may be hard to perceive from the use of speech or
social, commercial, political, or pedantic discourse in the present
day, it becomes more obvious in the case of carefully, yet plainly and
clearly written texts. The significance of this can begin to be
appreciated through some texts that discuss or describe useful,
interesting, timeless, or compelling subjects. For example; while we
no longer use many of the words or language like Shakespeare did, few
who read him fail to appreciate the ideas he conveys, his perceptive
insights, and the interesting and compelling tales and scenarios he
paints with his words.
If you have ever wondered why a given teacher or author explained
some subject or topic so much better than others you have read,
now you know why. He or she chose and used words in such a way
as to make clear the harmonious relations between the things discussed
or described, and your own perceptual framework; i.e., the words you
know and the ideas to which you subscribe or understand, i.e., your
worldview. The cognates and sensible structures in your worldview and
the sensible concept structures derived from the words you read
or heard, meshed in a high degree of logical consistency and
agreement. Learning may be described as the process of bringing
conceived corporeal structures into symmetrical alignment and
resonance (faithful agreement) with sensibly and corporeally perceived
structures.
Getting back to Hamlet, this play can and has been produced on
a stage and in motion pictures. In Shakespeare's time the stage
was not so elaborate and not as sophisticated as on the motion picture
screens of today. The producers would simply place signs on the stage
to indicate where the sea, the castle, or the forest were located.
Today, one might see the same thing in a grade school production.
Yet, the stage and the scenery can be changed so that they begin to
hinder the play. The sign with the words "The Sea" can be placed on
the castle. There would be no difficulty in imagination or practice in
encumbering the stage with pyramids, setting the play in an entirely
unrelated set, or simply adding staircases and folding screens that
cannot handle the roles of at least symbols of reality, preventing the
actors from playing their roles and the audience from taking in the
relatively little they can, never-the-less, see. (Not at all unlike
the noise and unrelated chatter that accompanies most usenet
newsgroups.)
In such a case, the logically necessary and sufficient correlation's
of harmony (symmetry,) and the resonance, between our sensibilities
and the physical circumstances (performance, stage, and scenery,) do
not exist or are difficult to apprehend. The law of the conservation
of the art ceases to be complied with under such conditions.
Physically, there are broken symmetries and the resonance of
Shakespeare's play is lost to the sensibilities. The whole affair can
become confusing, meaningless, uninteresting, and/or unentertaining;
i.e., nonsense.
We have found that mathematical equations of symmetry precisely
stipulate in which cases a change in the physical stage does not
matter to the play and in which it does. Physicists recognize the
importance of the symmetry of the properties of the vacuum. They find
that it is behind all physical interactions. Our research led us to
the conclusion that symmetry, along with balance and resonance, is
involved in all matters of conscious understanding and communicative
interactions as well.
Ken Ewell, MITi
David Longley
>
> Notice how David must bend and twist. It is called "saving the theory".
> It is an example of the failure of falsification. No amount of evidence
> will move David from his convictions, falsificationism to the contrary
> notwithstanding.
>
Have you ever read any of Skinner's work? Try "Beyond Freedom and Dignity"
--
David Longley
David Longley
mit...@readware.com "Ken Ewell" writes:
>
> Human behavior (imho) is irrelevant (and damaging) to the processes of
> unimpeded recognition and mensuration one would hope to achieve with a
> suitibly programmed machine.
Well, when Turing wrote 'On Computable Numbers..' back in 1936/7, a
computer was of course a person, and his functional specification of a
computing machine was of course based on human behaviour.
I don't think you have fully appreciated the thrust of the argument in
'Fragments...'
--
David Longley
Peter_...@uk.ibm.com
>David Longley <Da...@longley.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>
>
>><Snip...> This article therefore sets out the relevant
>>contemporary research background and outlines the practical
>>implications which these logical classes have for the applied,
>>practical work of criminological psychologists.
>
>Whether cirminological psychologists benefit from Quine's work is
>irrelavent to this subject.
Longley should be understood as a person desperately trying to put
Quine's ideas into practice. Hence the endless quotations. Unfortunately,
notions such as 'understanding', 'relevance', 'argument for or against',
'interpretation' are deeply intensional. Thus they are to be ruled out.
The result is what you see - a person that can't do without these notions,
but can't bring himself to embrace them, either. So we get the claim
of relevance, without the arguments to show how....etc, etc.
If you attempt to argue, the result is entirely predictable. You will get
so far and then Longley will just declare victory (generally once he gets
into trouble). He'll say something like: 'It doesn't matter what you or I think,
but only what's the case.' Now. Is this the way you want to waste your
time? I think not.
Cheers,
Pete Lupton
Peter_...@uk.ibm.com
>
>Like you, I am both a behaviourist and a Quinean. And like you I find the
>intensional idiom wanting. But unlike you, I argue that where "folk"
>psychology (NOT to be confused with all psychology) falls short is that it
>takes intentional descriptions as the end point, rather than the starting
>point, of more scientifically palatable explanations of behaviour.
I'm not a behaviourist, nor a Quinean. However, I do accept that FP cannot
be accepted as the end-point of scientific explanation. What I don't accept,
however, is that intensionality can be eliminated. Intensionality is here to
stay. What is characteristic of folk psychology is going to have to be
accepted by science come what may. Science accepts theories and
theorisers: that's all that's necessary for intensionality to occur.
So when we want a more palatable account, it isn't intensionality that's
at issue here. What we want is a scientifically palatable account of
intensionality. The argument I make is that parsimony-guided systems just do
require an intensional account. That's because they classify (parsimony
demands use and re-use and that's classification) and those classifications
can well stand in need of revision in order to preserve parsimony. So it
turns out that parsimony-guided systems support a notion of error. And that,
as they say, is that. Once we have systems which classify and can judge
those classifications as being in error, we have a full-blown notion of
content. And all because nature had the audacity to produce parsimony-
guided systems - such as ourselves.
The observation, therefore, is that intensional language is little more
than a tacit recognition of the role of parsimony in explaining the
behaviour of 'the folk'. As soon as any-one accepts parsimony as
a part of way 'the folk' work, they will, as a consequence, accept
the legitimacy of the intensional idiom. But not in a way wholly
unpalatable to science.
Cheers,
Pete Lupton
David Longley
>
> Longley should be understood as a person desperately trying to put
> Quine's ideas into practice. Hence the endless quotations. Unfortunately,
> notions such as 'understanding', 'relevance', 'argument for or against',
> 'interpretation' are deeply intensional. Thus they are to be ruled out.
> The result is what you see - a person that can't do without these notions,
> but can't bring himself to embrace them, either. So we get the claim
> of relevance, without the arguments to show how....etc, etc.
>
> If you attempt to argue, the result is entirely predictable. You will get
> so far and then Longley will just declare victory (generally once he gets
> into trouble). He'll say something like: 'It doesn't matter what you or I think,> but only what's the case.' Now. Is this the way you want to waste your
> time? I think not.
>
> Cheers,
> Pete Lupton
>
I thought you'd had it? It's really quite irrelevant what *sort of person*
I am. what's important is the material. You seem more intent on rhetoric &
argument for its own sake rather than actually discussing anything. If you
stopped playing to an audience for a moment and just focused on the issues
you might see that.
There is a real world problem out there, and some of the material I have
collated and presented, *may* help solve some of those problems. You seem
oblivious to that.
--
David Longley
Ken Ewell
>In <4j4og5$p...@huron.eel.ufl.edu>, mit...@readware.com (Ken Ewell) writes:
>>David Longley <Da...@longley.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>>
>>
>>><Snip...> This article therefore sets out the relevant
>>>contemporary research background and outlines the practical
>>>implications which these logical classes have for the applied,
>>>practical work of criminological psychologists.
>>
>>Whether cirminological psychologists benefit from Quine's work is
>>irrelavent to this subject.
>Longley should be understood as a person desperately trying to put
>Quine's ideas into practice. Hence the endless quotations. Unfortunately,
>notions such as 'understanding', 'relevance', 'argument for or against',
>'interpretation' are deeply intensional. Thus they are to be ruled out.
>The result is what you see - a person that can't do without these notions,
>but can't bring himself to embrace them, either. So we get the claim
>of relevance, without the arguments to show how....etc, etc.
>If you attempt to argue, the result is entirely predictable. You will get
>so far and then Longley will just declare victory (generally once he gets
>into trouble). He'll say something like: 'It doesn't matter what you or I think,
>but only what's the case.' Now. Is this the way you want to waste your
>time? I think not.
I see! I see! exclaimed the blind man to the sailor.
Ken Ewell
>In article <4j4og5$p...@huron.eel.ufl.edu>
> mit...@readware.com "Ken Ewell" writes:
>>
>> Human behavior (imho) is irrelevant (and damaging) to the processes of
>> unimpeded recognition and mensuration one would hope to achieve with a
>> suitibly programmed machine.
>Well, when Turing wrote 'On Computable Numbers..' back in 1936/7, a
>computer was of course a person, and his functional specification of a
>computing machine was of course based on human behaviour.
Certainly David, no one can argue with the techniques a person employs
to help convey the ideas they are attempting to impart; you should
take this to heart if that is not too intensional.
>I don't think you have fully appreciated the thrust of the argument in
>'Fragments...'
Well, against Peter Lupton's warning of the uselessness of engaging
you, and purely out of intensional human decency and sincere and
humble respect for all ideas, I will report to everyone here, what I
absorbed from reading the electronic files you refer to as
'Fragments..'.
David: Your work concerns a practical and rational system for
profiling (criminal) human behavior, particularly in the British
prison system. You are also concerned over the lack of rational and
foundational basis, formal procedures, or precise specifications, of
all or most existing psycholgical, cognitive (skills inventory and
assessments,) and behavioral models, that are in use. If I may presume
to sumarize your view: there are many "folk pyschologists" but few
"behavior scientists," where you are a qualified and attested behavior
scientist. You argue against using the null hypothesis and
hybrid-significance testing as the primary baises for evaluating or
judging behavioral issues; deeming it of mere statistical significance
in a mire of other statistical significances. You cotton to recursive
function theory in devising intellectucal tools and computational
methods for analytical and measurement purposes.
Using mostly quotes of arguments and assertions from Skinner, Quine,
Meehl, Turing, Church, et.al., you assert that everyone (in
authority) should agree on carefully chosen terminology and
purposefully finite discourse when recording, analyzing, and profiling
behavior. All of this, presumably, to extract coherence from the
otherwise incompetent and/or incoherent reporting of behavior that
leads to inadequate and wholly subjective, and "folk," psychological
assessments of cognitive skills.
You assert that adherence to an undefined, yet finite and rigid
stricture of discourse, that you define as an authoritative and
finite domain of allowable discourse, will yield some reliable
(logically computable) behavior predicates. These, you assert, will
become effective, in the measurement and analysis of behavior, as
functions and predicates in logical arguments about the signs of
certain behavior. I do understand, David, that forced agreement as
to what signs of behavior are allowed, what the signs may stand for,
and how they may be quantified, may work very well in an authoritative
environment and a totalitarian society. Such a system may well lead
to predictable outcomes; but surely, David, you recognize this as a
dangerous idea to a free-thinking society.
You offer nothing new in terms of set theory or the power of functions
and of predicates. You do not generally offer any real sets,
functions, or their predicate arguments, and you state that the
current methods and systems are inadequate wholly because of the
incompetent use of "folk" pschology and intensional language.
Simultaneously, you lay out a programme or "formal infrastructure"
for a rigid extensionality that you intensionally hope the British
prison system will adopt.
Now, David, let me also offer this: I do not know if anything you
have to say on the subject is useful in its context. I take it, prima
facia, that it is a practical and rational system for profiling
(criminal) behavior and that you are an expert in the field; having
found and reaped all the nuggets of wisdom from Skinner and Quine,
et.al., having years of practical and direct experience, etc.; but,
and this is the important part: I cannot conceive of how you can
extend this prescriptive idea, generally. Did you ever read the book
"1984" by George Orwell? Well, reading Fragments is scary like that,
when taken as a regime for scientific thiniking and generalized to all
social and political behavior, as you suggest.
David, it is enough that the application of algorithms can sometimes
be idiosyncratic, when put into practice on a stream or in a process;
particularly those that are supposed and intended to recognize and
discern significant information out of what may be largely
insignificant. I can attest that we do not want them exhibiting
criminal behavior that would require additional understanding, along
with a capacity to "probe" for abhorrent behavior patterns, such as
you are espousing. This makes much of 'Fragments...' irrelevant to
this subject.
You do touch on predicates: Yes, we must have predicates, but not
"human behavior" predicates; we must have natural and non-subjective
predicates. To be completely honest; I really cannot connect to the
behavior predicates you speak of. I thought all behavior was
predicated in empirical signs for that behavior; I am not a
psychlogist or a behavior scientist, though, I do not know.
I do know that if you want the ideal machine intelligence that was the
subject of Turing's work, you cannot prescribe a limited terminology
and interface using a finite, un-natural, and rigid form of artificial
discourse; a machine intelligence that can only interface with humans
in rigid, mechanical, pedantic, artificial, and otherwise un-natural
ways. This was not Turing's idea, your ideas are the antithesis of
Turing's.
David, in the case of a criminal system, you may be quite right, but
in the real world, you must process the intensional right along with
the extensional. I cannot imagine how you could suspect otherwise;
well, I could actually; it might be caused by presuming incompetence
and/or personal or emotional constraints in recognizing what is
coherent and significant out of all that is not; but presumed
constraints are probably intensional and being intensional you would
not let them stand as your presumed authority, would you?
Of course, should computer programs themselves, become indpendently
aware of what is lawful and what is not, and willful enough to commit
criminal acts, then I will be sure to remember you and the first to
call upon you, David, to understand their behavior. However, today,
computers are not held as criminals and anything you might have to say
about a politcally correct language using only "scientificly correct
behavior predicates" will probably be held against you in the court of
sensible appeals. In the meantime, David, you might consider
consulting one of your trusted colleagues, or if trustworthyness is
too intensional, anyone, to help you get over the severe case of
linguistic prescriptivisim that has you under its influence.
Ken Ewell
David Longley
mit...@readware.com "Ken Ewell" writes:
<snip>
Parts of this *do* reveal a clear understanding of what 'Fragments..'
outlines. Some of it does not. It's the latter which concerns me.
Forget about prisons, and think instead about schools, where the objective
is less easily conceived as 'sinister' or 'Orwellian'.
The 'predicates' have to be observation statements, and these should be the
skills which the curriculum is trying to teach. The teachers would assess
the students relative to those attainment criteria, feeding back to the
students their specific skill levels.
What the evidence suggests is that, as in medicine (where essentially the
same process occurs), it is best to record the observations, and let an
algorithm *statistically* analyse the data, rather than try to do so on
the basis of 'expert' judgment.
The reason why we don't find this sort of thing done (extensively) outside
of places like insurance companies, is, I think, really down to the degree
of *control* the interested parties have in the environment. That is, it
is a *management* problem. Even in schools, there are not the required number
of adminisrative and clerical staff which would be a pre-requisite for
effective and efficient teaching.
What have tried to outline is the natural *exchange* between the intensional
and extensional. We strive to effect strategies which can be automated from
the extensional stance, simply to make our decision making more accurate and
therefore fairer. Automation is the key here, but it is generally very
costly and requires people to use it and relinquish less accurate, clinical
"skills".
There's a dynamic tension between the extensional and intensional stance, and
that tension *does* have a lot to do with power, and is therefore potentially
open to abuse, but not in the way you fear.
There's more to fear from people in powerful positions where their decision
making is NOT subject to rational analysis. In a 'free thinking' society,
those in power and in positions of expertise are held to account for their
decisions, which ideally are *impersonal*.
What have I tried to outline is where we should look in current research
if we want to sustain what we call a "free society". Any decision making
based primarily on the intensional stance, on the other hand, actually
has no foundation in rationality - even though it presupposes it - and
that's what's frightening.
That's how the tyrants of this world get away with what they do.
--
David Longley
David Yeo
> What Quine is saying is that the intensional idioms provide a clue as to
> where works needs to be done. To the extent that we include them *as*
> elements of our scientific knowledge we are poluting our knowledge base.
Just to be clear, the notion of "polluting our knowledge base" is more a
reflection of your bias than Quine's re: the value (or lack of same) of
intentional idioms. Your first sentence is a more accurate representation
of Quine's view. In many ways Quine's view is reminiscent of Dennett's
notion of adopting the intensional stance for pragmatic reasons, except
that Quine, unlike (pre "Consciousness Explained") Dennett, espouses
elimination of the intentional idiom whenever possible.
> Now this is really quite a subtle, and radical point. It's like saying,
> where people are muttering about 'demonic possesion', 'rain gods' etc,
> there's the place to do science from the "extensional stance".
>
> Now what most psychologists and "cognitive scientists" are doing, is just
> becomming super-folk psyhcologists - if you look closely and carefully.
Again, I think you are over-generalising. As theorists in many fields are
often wont to do, early cognitive scientists hung their somewhat disjoint
theories on the "hot" metaphor of the times - in this case the computer.
The revitalistion of folk-theory was largely a function of the initial
success of traditional (predicate calculus) AI. But as the limitations of
'good old fashioned AI' became increasingly apparent, largely because of
formalising 'soft science' notions of intentionality in computer models,
the associated cognitivist/functionalist/intellectualist theories began to
lose support. Now only a few dogmatic theorists (e.g. Fodor) take folk
psychology seriously. Even Putnam, the self-proclaimed founder of the
functionalist movement, has abandoned his beloved 'prodigy'.
>
> Where I would further (constructively I hope) disagree with you is where
> you treat historical notions as if they are legitimate and useful elements
> of theory in behaviour science. You would't include notions from 15th or even
> 19th century physics as elements of contemporary theory. This has a lot to do
I stand to be corrected, but I think that even some of the notions of
Democritus (c. 100 B.C.) are still relevant to the physics of today. I'm
sure that a physicist could give you numerous examples of principles which
have survived relatively unchanged from (or before) the 19th century.
> with the non-cumulative nature of research in psychology. I refer you to
> a couple of raher good articles by Meehl (1967;1978) in the context of the
> sorry state of research *methodology* in psychology and cognitive science.
> A methodology which is, as I have said elsewhere, explcitly *intensional*,
> and therefore no methodology at all.
>
--
David Longley
dyeo@tortoise "David Yeo" writes:
> On Sun, 24 Mar 1996, David Longley wrote:
>
> > What Quine is saying is that the intensional idioms provide a clue as to
> > where works needs to be done. To the extent that we include them *as*
> > elements of our scientific knowledge we are poluting our knowledge base.
>
> Just to be clear, the notion of "polluting our knowledge base" is more a
> reflection of your bias than Quine's re: the value (or lack of same) of
> intentional idioms. Your first sentence is a more accurate representation
> of Quine's view. In many ways Quine's view is reminiscent of Dennett's
> notion of adopting the intensional stance for pragmatic reasons, except
> that Quine, unlike (pre "Consciousness Explained") Dennett, espouses
> elimination of the intentional idiom whenever possible.
I know why you say this, but I think the second sentence is not too far from
the letter of Quine, at least as he made his case back in the 1950s paper
"Quantifiers and Propositional Attitudes".
>
> > Now this is really quite a subtle, and radical point. It's like saying,
> > where people are muttering about 'demonic possesion', 'rain gods' etc,
> > there's the place to do science from the "extensional stance".
> >
> > Now what most psychologists and "cognitive scientists" are doing, is just
> > becomming super-folk psyhcologists - if you look closely and carefully.
>
> Again, I think you are over-generalising. As theorists in many fields are
> often wont to do, early cognitive scientists hung their somewhat disjoint
> theories on the "hot" metaphor of the times - in this case the computer.
> The revitalistion of folk-theory was largely a function of the initial
> success of traditional (predicate calculus) AI. But as the limitations of
> 'good old fashioned AI' became increasingly apparent, largely because of
> formalising 'soft science' notions of intentionality in computer models,
> the associated cognitivist/functionalist/intellectualist theories began to
> lose support. Now only a few dogmatic theorists (e.g. Fodor) take folk
> psychology seriously. Even Putnam, the self-proclaimed founder of the
> functionalist movement, has abandoned his beloved 'prodigy'.
>
My target is more those 'professionals' claiming to actually embrace
cognitivism in their applied work. Still, there is much in academic
work which may well be no more than "castles in the air".
Where Rescorla and others working in Learning Theory claim to be investigating
how animals learn relations, (S-S conditioning), or Gluck and Bower try to
model category judgement using ANNs, I think the term "Cognitive Science" is
really quite harmless. What I am explictly criticizing is the contrast, if
not heated controversy between behaviour science (as exemplified by the work
of Skinner etc) and the rather promissory "talk" from those who claim to be
doing "Cognitive Science".
When put that way - it's really a complaint that when ported from academia,
the fruits of cognitive science perish pretty quickly. What we are left
wity is a lot of talk which caches out as no better than *articulate*
folk-psychology dressed up in technical language, some of which is borrowed
from Computer Science, some from elsewhere, but little of it actually of much
if any use (beyond that which folk psychology normally achieves). In fact,
I'd go further and say that it colludes with entrenched folk psychological
practice, because its practitioners are seen by *clients* as endorsing their
own pre-conceived nonsense.
If you look at the section in "Fragments.." on what works you will see some
data reviewed which casts serious doubt on anything currently "working" as
to reduce recidivism. Only a few years ago I was listening to highly placed
"colleagues" (actually, sharing the same platform), totally misrepresent
the data, claiming that te efficacious component of treatment was "cognitive".
Not only is this highly unlikely to be the case (as I hope the text makes
clear), but the consequence of such ideological committment is actually a
policy shift which will put back the chance of practically doing anything
based on behaviour assessment and change.
I won't repeat that case here - I think the one I made is clear enough - but
I think it deserves serious attention by anyone who thinks that the issues
being discussed are just "academic".
> >
> > Where I would further (constructively I hope) disagree with you is where
> > you treat historical notions as if they are legitimate and useful elements
> > of theory in behaviour science. You would't include notions from 15th or even
> > 19th century physics as elements of contemporary theory. This has a lot to do
>
> I stand to be corrected, but I think that even some of the notions of
> Democritus (c. 100 B.C.) are still relevant to the physics of today. I'm
> sure that a physicist could give you numerous examples of principles which
> have survived relatively unchanged from (or before) the 19th century.
>
My use of the word 'historical' here was unfortunate. Clearly, in one sense,
General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics are 'historical'. I was of course
alluding to refuted theories.
--
David Longley
Ken Ewell
>The 'predicates' have to be observation statements, and these should be the
>skills which the curriculum is trying to teach.
<snip..>
All of this is very understandable, agreeable, and all very well
stated David.
>There's a dynamic tension between the extensional and intensional stance, and
>that tension *does* have a lot to do with power, and is therefore potentially
>open to abuse, but not in the way you fear.
I can clearly see now, from the way you have have suggested it here,
how important it is in your profession to have an "extensional" stance
as you have outlined.
>There's more to fear from people in powerful positions where their decision
>making is NOT subject to rational analysis. In a 'free thinking' society,
>those in power and in positions of expertise are held to account for their
>decisions, which ideally are *impersonal*.
All very agreeable.
>What have I tried to outline is where we should look in current research
>if we want to sustain what we call a "free society". Any decision making
>based primarily on the intensional stance, on the other hand, actually
>has no foundation in rationality - even though it presupposes it - and
>that's what's frightening.
>That's how the tyrants of this world get away with what they do.
I cannot say that I do not agree with this also, I do not hold "free
society" equal to or synonomous with anarchy. And I hope you
understand that, although I may use plenty of "intensional" language,
I would not presume to let my ideals guide my research for determinate
relations; of which, no decision should be necessary. Also, to be
perfectly clear, I do not advocate making any decision about natural
predicates; we need only adopt the ones found to be natural; and these
must be different the predicates for human behavior.
I must say David, now that I read your own words, I understand your
position and your conerns much better. I hope you will take the time
to understand mine, as I have posted earlier, and that we can strive
for agreement rather than disagreement.
David Longley
oh...@chatham.demon.co.uk "Oliver Sparrow" writes:
<snip>
> This has been complicated in three ways. One is the oversold concept
> of the selfish gene, whereby the goal of evolution is seen as the
> struggle of bits of code (genes and sub-gene regions, junk) to
> propagate themselves. The second is the useful concept of the
> behavioural/ social implications of information carriers: behaviour
> patterns which effect survival. Some of these may be directly coded -
> high blood pressure -> irritability, perhaps? - whilst others
> self-assemble when enough of a species are present: social
> structures, dominance hierarchies, mechanisms of co-operation and
> conflict management. Some of these transmit information of a
> selective nature without recourse to genes.
>
[.....]
> There is, therefore, a great deal more than the shuffling and
> modification of bits of code going on in evolution. Much of what is
> happening is occuring in a context - that of the rest of the
> organism, of its operating context. One cannot understand the outcome
> without understanding the context, which is changed by the outcome.
> _________________________________________________
>
> Oliver Sparrow
> oh...@chatham.demon.co.uk
>
Yes - and seen from an 'extensional stance', such an analysis need not
invoke such concepts as 'selfishness' etc at all. All of the behaviour
selected (at whatever level) is selected because the other behaviours
are selected out. But there is no *purpose* behind any of it.
To adopt a teleological stance is, if an y more than an instrumental
or methodological stance, yet another case of "going beyond the infor-
mation given.
From this perspective one can see why Natural Selection is not really
a scientific theory at all, it's just a useful way of looking at those
behaviours which *account* for our survival. Skinner's 'radical'
behaviorism is just the same principle applied to what we do.
--
David Longley
Oliver Sparrow
Da...@longley.demon.co.uk "David Longley" writes:
Several things. One, a few notes ago, responded to a critique of the
Probe publication by saying that useful system of management define
what they want to acheive, set up systems ot measure whther they have
done this and, finally, construct mechanisms which steer the system that
they are managing towards the goals which they seeking. Dynamicists would
take about error minimisation, but let's cut through the jargon to the
core of the matter:
Management sets goals Management measures attainment
| |
\|/ \|/
Measurement of mismatch between goals, achievement
|
Management-defined levers |
on stakeholders (ie on |
workforce, customers, |
regulators, shareholders. |
| |
\|/ \|/
Mismatch used to change behaviour amongst stakeholders
|
\|/
Changing levels of attainment
For "management", read 'powers that be', whoever is seeking to introduce
adaptive directionalityy to a system. Like the man who found that he had been
writing prose all of his life, I find this concept a degree familar. It feels
rather like running a company. The point argued is that the 'mismatch' should
be subject to metrication: indeed, that is why one has targets, accountants,
plans. The tricky bit does not lie there, however, but in the top right, where
one decides how things work and what one is going to do about them. That - the
systems modeling, the mechanisms of understanding how to address the problem,
of identifying the actors, their properties and linkages - is where the effort
goes and where most of the difficulties of AI have been encountered. You have
been talking Price Waterhouse-Arthur Anderson-ese, whilst the rest have been
speaking McKinsey.
Second point:
> In blah blah wef98239eu0 David Longley gabbled:
> From this perspective one can see why Natural Selection is not really
!!!!!!!!!!!
> a scientific theory at all, it's just a useful way of looking at those
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! :(
> behaviours which *account* for our survival.
Now that the steam has ceased to emerge from my ears, would you care to
suggest why natural selection s not a sceintific theory? It is predictive.
It is testable and has been tested. We understand how it works, why it
works and that it works. It is useful. It generalises into other areas,
such as engineering and cognition. WHAT MORE DO YOU WANT OF A THEORY?
Gah.
_________________________________________________
Oliver Sparrow
oh...@chatham.demon.co.uk
Peter_...@uk.ibm.com
>
>Second point:
> > In blah blah wef98239eu0 David Longley gabbled:
> > From this perspective one can see why Natural Selection is not really
> !!!!!!!!!!!
> > a scientific theory at all, it's just a useful way of looking at those
> !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! :(
> > behaviours which *account* for our survival.
>
>Now that the steam has ceased to emerge from my ears, would you care to
>suggest why natural selection s not a sceintific theory? It is predictive.
>It is testable and has been tested. We understand how it works, why it
>works and that it works. It is useful. It generalises into other areas,
>such as engineering and cognition. WHAT MORE DO YOU WANT OF A THEORY?
>Gah.
We can see what's going on. You start with:
'Philosophy of science is philosophy enough'
and end up with:
'What fits my philosophy of science is science enough'
Cheers,
Pete Lupton
David Longley
In a nutshell - yes. And what's wrong with that?
(perhaps I posted my reply to Oliver in the wrong thread?)....so...
There are two parts to your article, but I think I can respond to
both via the following.
From my experience, most of the big consultancy companies do
little more than collude with the generally ill thought out
organizational psychology which is characteristic of management
in our large public and private sector organisations.
Like many of the contributions to usenet, what characterises so
much of contemporary management consultancy is *superficially
appealing rhetoric* which has little contact with the actual
mechanics of what organisations actually *do*. From my
experience, this is usually because administrators are too
abstracted from operations to adequately resource the policy they
generate, and so it's rarely specified precisely enough for those
further down the line to implement it properly and let it 'bed in
and evolve'.
Science on the other hand is a critical enterprise, and the
criticism is essentially a function of the testability of our
predictions (plans/polices). Alas, what often passes for the
above is no more than rhetoric, nicely crafted, folk psychology
which is persuasive simply *because* it leaves no room for doubt.
We have the wrong type of people in management positions.
A little reflection should suffice to persuade anyone seriously
interested in the growth of knowledge that rhetoric and eloquence
simply disguise our ignorance, and that it's the exposure of the
latter which is characteristic of the "Pursuit of Truth".
I'll answer more directly by citing what I was alluding to when I
made the statement which 'aroused' you:
"Darwinism as a Metaphysical Research Programme
[...] I have come to the
conclusion that Darwinism is not a testable scientific
theory, but a metaphysical research programme-a possible
framework for testable scientific theories.
Yet there is more to it: I also regard Darwinism as an
application of what I call "situational logic".
Darwinism as situational logic can be understood as
follows.
Let there be a world, a framework of limited constancy,
in which there are entities of limited variability. Then
some of the entities produced by variation (those which
do "fit" into the conditions of the framework) will
"survive", while others (those which clash with the
conditions) will be eliminated .
Add to this the assumption of the existence of a special
framework-a set of perhaps rare and highly individual
conditions-in which there can be life, or more
especially, self-reproducing but nevertheless variable
bodies. Then a situation is given in which the idea of
trial and error-elimination, or of Darwinism, becomes
not merely applicable, but almost logically necessary.
[...]
To avoid any misunderstanding: it is not in every
possible situation that Darwinian theory would be
successful; rather, it is a very special, perhaPs even a
unique situation. But even in a situation without life
Darwmlan selection can apply to some extent: atomic
nuclei which are relatively stable (in the situation in
question) will tend to be more abundant than unstable
ones; and the same may hold for chemical compounds.
[...]
I now wish to give some reasons why I regard Darwinism
as metaphysical, and as a research programme.
It is metaphysical because it is not testable.
[...]
Take "adaptation". At first sight natural selection
appears to explain It, and in a way it does, but it is
hardly a scientific way. To say that a species now
living is adapted to its environment is, in fact, almost
tautological Indeed we use the terms "adaptation" and
"selection" in such a way that we can say that, if the
species were not adapted, it would have been eliminated
by natural selection. Similarly, if a species has been
eliminated it must have been 1ll adapted to the
conditions. Adaptation or fitness is defined by modern
evolutionists as survival value, and can be measured by
actual success in survival: there is hardly any
possibility of testing a theory as feeble as this.
And yet, the theory is invaluable. I do not see how,
without it, our knowledge could have grown as it has
done since Darwin. In trying to explain experiments with
bacteria which become adapted to, say, penicillin, it is
quite clear that we are greatly helped by the theory of
natural selection. Although it is metaphysical, it
sheds much light upon very concrete and very practical
researches. It allows us to study adaptation to a new
environment (such as a penicillin-infested environment)
in a rational way: it suggests the existence of a
mechanism of adaptation, and it allows us even to study
in detail the mechanism at work. And it is the only
theory so far which does all that.
This is, of course, the reason why Darwinism has
been almost universally accepted. Its theory of
adaptation was the first nontheistic one, and theism was
worse than an open admission of failure, for it created
the impression that an incontrovertible explanation had
been reached.
Now to the degree that Darwinism creates the same
impression, it is not so very much better than the
theistic view of adaptation, it is therefore important
to show that Darwinism is not a scientific theory, but
metaphysical. But its value for science as a
metaphysical research programme is that, especially if
it is admitted, that it may be criticized and improved."
Sir Karl Popper
The Philosophy of Karl Popper (Ed Schilpp, 1974)
Part I (Intellectual Autobiography)
--
David Longley
Andrzej Pindor
Oliver Sparrow <oh...@chatham.demon.co.uk> wrote:
.................
>Now that the steam has ceased to emerge from my ears, would you care to
>suggest why natural selection s not a sceintific theory? It is predictive.
The problem with natural selection as a scientific theory is that it uses
the notion of "fitness" which cannot usually be defined in advance. Usually
we say that "fitness" is what is present in the species which propagate.
Very rarely you can say in advance, before seeing the result, that a given
characteristic increases fitness.
>It is testable and has been tested. We understand how it works, why it
I'd like to know one example of such test, where the conditions were not stack
from the begining towards a favorable outcome.
>works and that it works. It is useful. It generalises into other areas,
>such as engineering and cognition. WHAT MORE DO YOU WANT OF A THEORY?
>Gah.
Don't get me wrong. I do not claim that natural selection is all smoke
and mirrors. However, the support for it is fairly weak. In the majority of
cases I know of the analysis of data actually assumes at the begining the
result it is trying to show.
In my view evolution is mainly a mental framework (or a metaphysical theory)
which is an expression of a belief that what forms of life we see result
ultimately from knowable laws of nature in a way which can be logically
analysed. As you rightly say above, this framework proves useful - it has
lead to a lot of advances in medical and biological sciences and in many
cases it has made us more "fit", even though the long-term consequences of
our 'meddling' are impossible to predict.
>_________________________________________________
>
> Oliver Sparrow
> oh...@chatham.demon.co.uk
Andrzej
--
Andrzej Pindor The foolish reject what they see and
University of Toronto not what they think; the wise reject
Information Commons what they think and not what they see.
pin...@breeze.hprc.utoronto.ca Huang Po
Ken Ewell
>David Longley <Da...@longley.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>>At the heart of 20th century logic there is a very interesting problem
>>(illuminated over the last three decades by W.V.O Quine (1956, 1960,
>>1990,1992), which seems to be divisive with respect to the
>>classification and analysis of 'mental' (or psychological) phenomena
>>as opposed to 'physical' phenomena. The problem is variously known as
>>Brentano's Thesis (Quine 1960), 'the problem of intensionality', or
>>'the content-clause problem'.
I am inclined to believe that this is one of the problems that stems
from thinking about the language we use, purely, as a mental or
psychological phenomenon. We should not be surprised at the problems
that arise when "language" is clasified in this way; both artbitrary
and capricious.
I am very well aware of how widespread and deeply held this assumption
about language is, however; given the breadth and depth of existing
problems, is it not yet time to see how things might look if this
assumption were changed. After all, this should not be difficult to
do, we often change our assumptions as often as our cloths.
Why should all of logic, all of reason, all of the intensional and all
of the extensional language we use, stand upon a baseless assumption
that language is merely a psychological and/or mental feature of human
behavior; a mental phenomenon; and as such, that; language is wholly
and completely arbitrary and capricious?
Not that it is not a feature of human behavior, mind you, but language
also operates in nature; in plants, in insects, and in other animals
besides humans.
Besides the elaboration of language that we know as the "institution
of speech," language is the very foundation for communications.
Language is the natural means, i.e, a fundamental capacity to signal,
gesture, or sign; without which, there would be nothing to convey
through a channel of communications, and the interaction would be
empty; void of purpose, void of gesture or intent, void of signal. We
know that this is not the case. It is for this reason, that language
should be understood as a natural system by which any existent entity
may signal; as I am signaling (using signs for things) right here and
right now.
If you take just one example of the existence of language outside the
human context, say the communicative relationship between plants and
insects, you may begin to see how it is possible that language in
itself, may not be as arbitrary and capricious as previously assumed;
language may not be a properly classified as a wholly human and
psyhcological phenomena. You may discern that this approach which I
will introduce below is not incompatible with the philosophical ideas
denoted as "panpyschism;" it may be found capable of filling in some
missing pieces in that approach.
My colleagues and I are not alone in this sentiment: There have been
many in history and today who have thought long and hard about
language; but as recently as a decade ago, Noam Chomsky, who is one
of the great fathers of modern computational linguistics, wondered,
without reaching ultimate results, about language fundamentals, "its
nature, origin, and use" and complained that "much of what is
misleadingly called the semantics of natural language ... is not
semantics at all, if by semantics we mean THE STUDY OF THE RELATION
BETWEEN LANGUAGE AND THE WORLD... " (emphasis added.) "Rather," he
goes on; "this work deals with certain postulated levels of mental
representation...;" i.e., pseudosemanticism.
Chomsky, N. (1985). Knowledge of language: Its nature, origin,
and use (pp. 15-50). In Anshen, R.N.(ed.). Convergence. New York:
Praeger.
I mean, it is not only possible, it is probable, that the confusion in
the endeavors of understanding computers and cognition is prolonged
because we do not have an acceptable theory of language, or of *its*
relations (semantics;) i.e., how language operates between us and the
world at large.
No one would argue that the missing theory would not have an impact on
existing ideas, and on how we think about our thinking. Yet, while
most will acknowledge that there is a missing theory, they continue to
base their thinking on a mental language that exists only in the minds
and speech of human beings; and on pseudosemantics between mental and
grammatic objects that have no (or a purely statistical) relation to
the world at large or between the world and our intensional or
extensional ideas about the world and what is in it.
To be completely honest, it is quite a marvel of absurdity, to me,
how learned men and women can unabashedly assume that there is nothing
in the realm of language that lies outside mental processes and human
behavior; that there is nothing in the institution of speech that may
be brought back to the fixed elements of a nature, immutable as to
substance, although variable to infinity as to forms.
None-the-less, no one can deny that there are times when it is
necessary, for one reason or another, to return to the drawing boards;
meaning to return to, and re-examine, those guiding assumptions that
we sometimes take for granted.
Winograd and Flores suggested in their work;"A New Foundation for
Design" (1985,) a return to the drawing boards in the area of
"understanding computers and cognition". They argue there with
Heidegger that we become "blind" whenever we try to observe our own
cognitive processes; "because our view is limited to what can be
expressed in the terms we have adopted."
While considering the problems with understanding computers and
cognition. the research company I work for, Management Information
Technologies, Inc., (MITi,) adopted a theory of language that is based
on physical grounds. We arrived at the theory inductively, by
studying language as a natural (physical) phenomenon.
The approach we took is unique in this aspect: We assumed, in the
latter part of the 1970’s, that the confusion surrounding research on
natural language and cognitive processes is compounded by the lack of
a theory of "real" language semantics. Such a theory should have the
power to explain the relation between human knowledge --as formulated
by language-- and the real world it refers to. This, in turn, would
be helpful in defining logically concordant systems for dealing with
human knowledge about the world as it is presently known.
To arrive at a theory, pseudosemanticism had to be avoided and the
phenomenon of blindness had to be prevented from aborting the research
process. Now this is what made it truly and remarkably interesting
for us and should make it quite interesting for those in philosophy,
psychology, and in the cognitive sciences:
Since we are found to have a restricted view whenever we observe our
cognitive processes, one way to develop a better vision is to assume
that knowledge stems from natural sources disconnected from us. It is
not necessary to speculate upon what the source or sources may be.
One needs only to assume that language is part of nature.
This is where it becomes interesting for reseachers: The impact of
experience on our view of language can be attenuated by this
assumption if we study language as a source of new information about a
real world containing language as a separate subset.
It should also be noted that the relations between language and the
real world found on this basis are free from the blame of
pseudosemanticism. During the early part of the research process, we
did not consciously attempt to name the relations we found, it was
only necessary to acknowledge, catalog, and look for their occurrences
(for a latter taxonomy) without forming any conception of what they
may be called.
We can suggest now, after formally studying language in this way for
more than a decade, that what we call “language” is a system of signs,
signals gestures, and fluctuations, grounded in a field of physical
symmetry; a field of balance, harmony, and resonance, that exists in
nature and in our thoughts about it. We are certainly consciously
aware of this field in that sense of its existence. To distinguish
this natural aspect of language from the mental institutions and oral
traditions we call language, let us call this “natural language.”
In light of the above, we can re-examine the suppositions of some of
our most learned philosophers, linguists, psychologists, and cognitive
and behavioral scientists. Among them, W.V.O Quine:
It has been reported that it has been argued quite convincingly by
Quine that there can not be a universal language of thought or
'mentalese', since such a system would presume determinate
translation relations.
The fact is, there does not need to be a "universal language of
thought" or ‘mentalese’ as Quine puts it, if there is indeed a natural
language operating in the world.
It is language that is natural, and ‘universal,’ in mental terms,
because each of our thoughts are based on it, i.e., on perceiving it,
and they are carried through it, to any other being that needs only
tacitly recognize it.
Further, we have found the relations between language and the world,
and between language and our thoughts about the world, to be
invariantly determinate.
Quine holds that:
>>Different languages are different systems of behavior which may
>>achieve similar ends, but they do not support direct, determinate
>>translation relations.
Consider this: A Frenchman and an Englishman sit down together at a
table over a cup of coffee (it could just as easily be an Arab and a
Chinaman.) While the two men each have different names to refer to
these objects and this circumstance in their thus shared reality, no
one would claim that either of them would disagree over what the
objects in their reality, in fact are, or, for that matter, anything
constituting their present, sensed, and shared reality; i.e., both
would agree that they are sitting together at a table over a cup of
coffee.
We can assume, in this example, that each man has his own culturally
and personally distinct cognition of the real objects and events
present to each of them and that neither of them speak the other's
language.
Now here is the question for anyone in this newsgroup:
If the mentally held ideas for these objects in this reality, do not
stem from cognates for the recognized, discerned, and determinant
relations signaled by the presence of the actual (real) objects
themselves, on what would you suppose the two men base their agreement
over what they each independently perceive the objects in their
circumstance to be?
Ken Ewell, MITi
epf...@aol.com
> Take "adaptation". At first sight natural selection
> appears to explain It, and in a way it does, but it is
> hardly a scientific way. To say that a species now
> living is adapted to its environment is, in fact, almost
> tautological Indeed we use the terms "adaptation" and
> "selection" in such a way that we can say that, if the
> species were not adapted, it would have been eliminated
> by natural selection. Similarly, if a species has been
> eliminated it must have been 1ll adapted to the
> conditions. Adaptation or fitness is defined by modern
> evolutionists as survival value, and can be measured by
> actual success in survival: there is hardly any
> possibility of testing a theory as feeble as this.
Given that there was competition for survival within a
heterogeneous population, then of course it is tautologous
to say that the fittest were the most likely to survive, if
by "fittest" one means those most likely to survive. But
surely that isn't the substance of the theory of natural
selection! Surely the substance is at least in part, that
for each species *there was* such a heterogeneous population,
and *there was* such a struggle, and not just once, but
continuously since the first, molecular ancestors. This
is not a tautology.
One important innovation of the natural selection theory is to
say that the first instance of newer, better designs was
usually the outcome of a large number of random mutations, most
of which went nowhere. It may be true that, by definition,
these improved designs would tend to win the competition for
survival. But I don't think it's tautologous to say that
improvements were generated "shotgun" style, through
sufficiently large numbers of random mutations.
Ed Faith
> I think Popper's criticism is a constructive and helpful one if looked
> at carefully - and it must be acknowledged to be a constructive one.
> The force of the criticism is to point out that once stripped of its
> value as a re-orienting alternative to creationism or Lamarkism, it
> is not a very good theory, if theory at all. The same goes Skinner's
> Radical Behaviourism. Skinner had the sense to acknowledge this.
But specifically, all Popper seems to be saying is that it's
circular to say that the fittest will tend to survive, if by fittest
one means those that will tend to survive. I don't see why pointing this
out demonstrates that the theory is not good, since after all, the
theory *is not* the simple claim that the fittest will tend to survive.
(In my previous post I outlined some substantial points which I think
the theory makes.)
Perhaps the theory doesn't answer some questions Popper wants
answered, such as, what is it that makes one animal fitter than
another, i.e., more likely to survive, but I don't see why it
has to. There may not be a general answer to such a question.
David Longley
pin...@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca "Andrzej Pindor" writes:
>
> Don't get me wrong. I do not claim that natural selection is all smoke
> and mirrors. However, the support for it is fairly weak. In the majority of
> cases I know of the analysis of data actually assumes at the begining the
> result it is trying to show.
> In my view evolution is mainly a mental framework (or a metaphysical theory)
> which is an expression of a belief that what forms of life we see result
> ultimately from knowable laws of nature in a way which can be logically
> analysed. As you rightly say above, this framework proves useful - it has
> lead to a lot of advances in medical and biological sciences and in many
> cases it has made us more "fit", even though the long-term consequences of
> our 'meddling' are impossible to predict.
> Andrzej
Apart from my predictble endorsement of the above, I'd like to throw another
element into the equation being shaped here and elsewhere, namely that (as was
pointed out long ago by Carnap, & again quite recently by Paul Churchland), a
major advance in objective knowledge (at the expense of 'common sense') was
the triumph of *relations* or *functions* over predicates. The credit again
goes ultimately to Frege (1879).
Predicates are prone to make one look at the world in terms of properties and
all the limitations which come with them. The paper by Carnap on the 'old and
new logic' in Ayer's 1950s anthology on Logical Positivism, presents, along
with the paper by Hans Hahn, a very strong case against the merits of 'common
sense'...
---
David Longley
David Yeo
> Not that it is not a feature of human behavior, mind you, but language
> also operates in nature; in plants, in insects, and in other animals
> besides humans.=20
>=20
> Besides the elaboration of language that we know as the "institution
> of speech," language is the very foundation for communications.
> Language is the natural means, i.e, a fundamental capacity to signal,
> gesture, or sign; without which, there would be nothing to convey
> through a channel of communications, and the interaction would be
> empty; void of purpose, void of gesture or intent, void of signal. We
> know that this is not the case. It is for this reason, that language
> should be understood as a natural system by which any existent entity
> may signal; as I am signaling (using signs for things) right here and
> right now.
>=20
> If you take just one example of the existence of language outside the
> human context, say the communicative relationship between plants and
> insects, you may begin to see how it is possible that language in
> itself, may not be as arbitrary and capricious as previously assumed;
> language may not be a properly classified as a wholly human and
> psyhcological phenomena. You may discern that this approach which I
> will introduce below is not incompatible with the philosophical ideas
> denoted as "panpyschism;" it may be found capable of filling in some
> missing pieces in that approach.
>=20
If by "language" you mean the ability to form and manipulate symbols, I
think that you may be confusing the terms "language" and "communication"
(or, perhaps, even more fundamentally "language" and "interaction").=20
<snip>
> The fact is, there does not need to be a "universal language of
> thought" or =91mentalese=92 as Quine puts it, if there is indeed a natura=
l
> language operating in the world. =20
>=20
According to my understanding Fodor's use of the term, "mentalese" is the
foundation of thought and, therefore, for natural language. It is, in
essence, the stuff from which natural language is forged. Thus natural
language is in no way a substitute for, nor incompatible with, one having
a language of thought. Where Fodor's "mentalese" runs into trouble is
with respect to symbol grounding. To quote Harnad (1991):=20
The standard reply of the symbolist (e.g. Fodor) is that the meaning=20
of the symbols comes from connecting the symbol system to the world "in
the right way". But it seems apparent that the problem of connecting up
with the world in the right way is virtually coextensive with the
problem of cognition itself.
(The Symbol Grounding Problem, p. 340)
<snip>
>=20
> Now here is the question for anyone in this newsgroup: =20
>=20
> If the mentally held ideas for these objects in this reality, do not
> stem from cognates for the recognized, discerned, and determinant
> relations signaled by the presence of the actual (real) objects
> themselves, on what would you suppose the two men base their agreement
> over what they each independently perceive the objects in their
> circumstance to be?
In short, guided trial-and-error (see Quine).=20
Actually your question is a hornet's-nest. For embedded in the question
are such notions as similarity, meaning, and the merit of naive realism.=20
With respect to the latter, as Bertrand Russell so succinctly put it:=20
Naive realism leads to physics, and physics, if true, shows naive=20
realism to be false. Therefore naive realism, if true, is false;=20
therefore it is false
(An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth, p. 14)=20
--
Cheers,
David Longley
--
David Longley
Neil Rickert
>Another way of 'explaining common-sense' is as *lucky guesses* <g>.
Right. But it is a rather poor explanation. Common sense does
better than random guesses by a substantial margin.
Ken Ewell
>If by "language" you mean the ability to form and manipulate symbols, I
>think that you may be confusing the terms "language" and "communication"
>(or, perhaps, even more fundamentally "language" and "interaction").=20
No, I said "langauge" is the capacity to signal. Communications is a
carrier not a signal. You may establish an open channel of
communications, but without the fluctuations of the carrier, i.e., the
signal(s) themselves, there is no communications. Interaction (in
this sense) is the transmission *and* the reception of signals through
the communications carrier.
>> The fact is, there does not need to be a "universal language of
>> thought" or "mentalese" as Quine puts it, if there is indeed a natural
>> language operating in the world.
>According to my understanding Fodor's use of the term, "mentalese" is the
>foundation of thought and, therefore, for natural language. It is, in
>essence, the stuff from which natural language is forged.
Granted. I think he is wrong. *Natural language* cannot be "forged"
upon the individual mental ideas and representations it is supposed
and intended to convey. I am saying it is the opposite of this:
Individual ideas and mental representations are forged out of natural
language. Human language, of course, may be "forged" upon these, in
the sense that human language gives shape to mental ideas.
>Thus natural
>language is in no way a substitute for, nor incompatible with, one having
>a language of thought. <snip>
I do not understand this response.
> The standard reply of the symbolist (e.g. Fodor) is that the meaning=20
> of the symbols comes from connecting the symbol system to the world "in
> the right way". But it seems apparent that the problem of connecting up
> with the world in the right way is virtually coextensive with the
> problem of cognition itself.
> (The Symbol Grounding Problem, p. 340)
My sentiments also. The problem is the one I am addressing here.
>> Now here is the question for anyone in this newsgroup:
>>
>> If the mentally held ideas for these objects in this reality, do not
>> stem from cognates for the recognized, discerned, and determinant
>> relations signaled by the presence of the actual (real) objects
>> themselves, on what would you suppose the two men base their agreement
>> over what they each independently perceive the objects in their
>> circumstance to be?
>In short, guided trial-and-error (see Quine)
"guided trial and error???" What is that -- more nonsense: They try
to imagine they see a cup of coffee in front of them, but they guess
it is a glass of juice and try again until they both agree it is a cup
of coffee? This does not come close to answering the question.
>Actually your question is a hornet's-nest.
It is meant to be, but not for the following reason:
>For embedded in the question
>are such notions as similarity, meaning, and the merit of naive realism.
Similarity and meaning are exactly what we are talking about. I try
to choose my words carefully and form them into expressions that
denote what they are supposed and intended to convey, without the need
for connotation. Embedded in the question are the notions of how we
realize the real objects and events taking place in a shared reality;
nothing more. Can anyone address the queston without debating the
merits or the truth or falsification of naive realism?
David Longley
OK.
If you *insist* on pedantry where humour was intended: as *biased sampling*.
--
David Longley
Neil Rickert
>OK.
That does not explain anything, unless you can account for the bias.
Ken Ewell
>>OK.
David, how can you dismiss common sense, even though obviously biased,
as a lucky guess. I imagine that there are many tens of millions of
people in the world that (happily) get through life without any
further authority for their meaning than their common sense.
It is not a lucky guess that we can recognize and discern the ideas
signaled by these words in these messages in this newsgroup. It is the
result of a lifetime of training, discipline, and experience; there is
nothing *lucky* about this; indeed, if anything, it may be the result
of "privilege."
David Longley
mit...@readware.com "Ken Ewell" writes:
>
> David, how can you dismiss common sense, even though obviously biased,
> as a lucky guess. I imagine that there are many tens of millions of
> people in the world that (happily) get through life without any
> further authority for their meaning than their common sense.
>
> It is not a lucky guess that we can recognize and discern the ideas
> signaled by these words in these messages in this newsgroup. It is the
> result of a lifetime of training, discipline, and experience; there is
> nothing *lucky* about this; indeed, if anything, it may be the result
> of "privilege."
>
that we have very little faith in common-sense. We study remote, uncivilized
tribes and contrast their belief systems with the advantages our science has
given us.
What you may not appreciate is that you are behaving just as the church did
when Copernicus and Galileo began to lay the foundations of our objective
knowledge.
Just as discussions as to the proper aims of "artificial intelligence" will
get nowhere until the terms are clearly understood, so to, all this talk of
"common sense" will amount to nothing until we have an agreed frame of
reference.
I take "common sense" to be the set of heuristics which researchers in
'attribution theory' etc have been seeking to explicate. These comprise
the modus operandi of "naive" or "folk" psychology. These heuristics are
essentially inductive in nature.
--
David Longley
David Longley
> In <828567...@longley.demon.co.uk> David Longley <Da...@longley.demon.co.uk>
> writes:
> >In article <4jp9dp$t...@mp.cs.niu.edu> ric...@cs.niu.edu "Neil Rickert" writes:>
> >> >Another way of 'explaining common-sense' is as *lucky guesses* <g>.
>
> >> Right. But it is a rather poor explanation. Common sense does
> >> better than random guesses by a substantial margin.
>
> >OK.
>
> >If you *insist* on pedantry where humour was intended: as *biased sampling*.
>
> That does not explain anything, unless you can account for the bias.
>
>
The bias is accounted for by our non-randonm sampling, ie by our idiocyncratic
vista on the world. I thought I'd outlined that at length:
There is a logical possibility that in restricting the subject matter
of psychology, and thereby the deployment of psychologists, to what
can only be analysed and managed from a Methodological Solipsistic
(cognitive) perspective, one will render some very significant results
of research in psychology irrelevant to applied *behaviour* science
and technology, unless taken as a vindication of the stance that
behaviour is essentially context specific. As explicated above,
intensions are not, in principle, amenable to quantitative analysis.
They are, in all likelihood, only domain or context specific. A few
further examples should make these points clearer.
Many Cognitive Psychologists study 'Deductive Inference' from the
perspective of 'psychologism', a doctrine, which, loosely put,
equates the principles of logic with those of thinking. Yet the work
of Church (1936), Post (1936) and Turing (1937) clearly established
that the principles of 'effective' computation are not psychological,
and can in fact be mechanically implemented. However, researchers in
'Cognitive Science' such as Johnson-Laird and Byrne (1992) have
reviewed 'mental models' which provide an account for some of the
difficulties and some of the errors observed in human deductive
reasoning (Wason 1966). Throughout the 1970s, substantial empirical
evidence began to accumulate to refute the functionalist (Putnam 1967)
thesis that human cognitive processes were formal and computational.
Even well educated subjects it seems, have considerable difficulty
with relatively simple deductive Wason Selection tasks such as the
following:
_____ _____ _____ _____
| | | | | | | |
| A | | T | | 4 | | 7 |
|_____| |_____| |_____| |_____|
Where the task is to test the rule "if a card has a vowel on one side
it has an even number on the other".
Or in the following:
_____ _____ _____ _____
| | | | | | | |
| A | | 7 | | D | | 3 |
|_____| |_____| |_____| |_____|
where subjects are asked to test the rule 'each card that has an A on
one side will have a 3 on the other'. In both problems they can only
turn over a maximum of two cards to ascertain the truth of the rule.
Similarly, the majority have difficulty with the following,
similar problem, where the task is to reveal up to two hidden
halves of the cards to ascertain the truth or falsehood of the rule
'whenever there is a O on the left there is a O on the right':
_____________ _____________ ____________ ____________
| ||||||| | ||||||| ||||||| | ||||||| |
| O ||||||| | ||||||| ||||||| O | ||||||| |
|______||||||| |______||||||| |||||||______| |||||||______|
(a) (b) (c) (d)
Yet computer technology has no difficulty with these examples of the
application of basic deductive inference rules (modus ponens and modus
tollens). The above require the application of the material
conditional. [1] is falsified by turning cards A and 9, [2] by turning
cards A and 7, and [3] by turning cards (a) and (d). Logicians, and
others trained in the formal rules of deductive logic often fail to
solve such problems:
'Time after time our subjects fall into error. Even some
professional logicians have been known to err in an
embarrassing fashion, and only the rare individual takes
us by surprise and gets it right. It is impossible to
predict who he will be. This is all very puzzling....'
P. C. Wason and P. N. Johnson-Laird (1972)
Psychology of Reasoning
Furthermore, there is impressive empirical evidence that formal
training in logic does not generalise to such problems (Nisbett et al
1987). Yet why is this so if, in fact, human reasoning is, as the
cognitivists, have claimed, essentially logical and computational?
Wason (1966) also provided subjects with numbers which increased in
series, asking them to identify the rule. In most cases, the simple
fact that all examples shared no more than simple progression was
skipped, and whatever hypotheses they created were held onto even
though the actual rule was subsequently made clear. This persistence
of belief, and rationalisation of errors despite debriefing and
exposure to contrary evidence, is well documented in psychology, and
is a phenomenon which methodologically is, as Popper makes clear in
the leading quote to this paper, at odds with the formal advancement
of knowledge. Here is what Sir Karl Popper (1965) had to say about
this matter:
'My study of the CONTENT of a theory (or of any
statement whatsoever) was based on the simple and
obvious idea that the informative content of the
CONJUNCTION, ab, of any two statements, a, and b, will
always be greater than, or at least equal to, that of
its components.
Let a be the statement 'It will rain on Friday'; b the
statement 'It will be fine on Saturday'; and ab the
statement 'It will rain on Friday and it will be fine on
Saturday': it is then obvious that the informative
content of this last statement, the conjunction ab, will
exceed that of its component a and also that of its
component b. And it will also be obvious that the
probability of ab (or, what is the same, the probability
that ab will be true) will be smaller than that of
either of its components.
Writing Ct(a) for 'the content of the statement a', and
Ct(ab) for 'the content of the conjunction a and b', we
have
(1) Ct(a) <= Ct(ab) => Ct(b)
This contrasts with the corresponding law of the
calculus of probability,
(2) p(a) => p(ab) <= p(b)
where the inequality signs of (1) are inverted. Together
these two laws, (1) and (2), state that with increasing
content, probability decreases, and VICE VERSA; or in
other words, that content increases with increasing
IMprobability. (This analysis is of course in full
agreement with the general idea of the logical CONTENT
of a statement as the class of ALL THOSE STATEMENTS
WHICH ARE LOGICALLY ENTAILED by it. We may also say that
a statement a is logically stronger than a statement b
if its content is greater than that of b - that is to
say, if it entails more than b.)
This trivial fact has the following inescapable
consequences: if growth of knowledge means that we
operate with theories of increasing content, it must
also mean that we operate with theories of decreasing
probability (in the sense of the calculus of
probability). Thus if our aim is the advancement or
growth of knowledge, then a high probability (in the
sense of the calculus of probability) cannot possibly be
our aim as well: THESE TWO AIMS ARE INCOMPATIBLE.
I found this trivial though fundamental result about
thirty years ago, and I have been preaching it ever
since. Yet the prejudice that a high probability must be
something highly desirable is so deeply ingrained that
my trivial result is still held by many to be
'paradoxical'.
K. Popper
Truth, Rationality, and the Growth of Knowledge
Ch. 10, p 217-8
CONJECTURES AND REFUTATIONS (1965)
Modus tollens and the extensional principle that a compound event can
only be less probable (or equal) to its component events independently
is fundamental to the logic of scientific discovery, and yet this,
along with other principles of extensionality (deductive logic) seem
to be principles which are in considerable conflict with intuition, as
Kahneman and Tversky (1983) demonstrated with their illustration of
the 'Linda Problem'. In conclusion, the above authors wrote, twenty
years after Wason's experiments on deductive reasoning and Popper's
(1965) remarks on Conjectures and Refutation':
'In contrast to formal theories of belief, intuitive
judgments of probability are generally not extensional.
People do not normally analyse daily events into
exhaustive lists of possibilities or evaluate compound
probabilities by aggregating elementary ones. Instead,
they use a limited number of heuristics, such as
representativeness and availability (Kahneman et al.
1982). Our conception of judgmental heuristics is based
on NATURAL ASSESSMENTS that are routinely carried out as
part of the perception of events and the comprehension
of messages. Such natural assessments include
computations of similarity and representativeness,
attributions of causality, and evaluations of the
availability of associations and exemplars. These
assessments, we propose, are performed even in the
absence of a specific task set, although their results
are used to meet task demands as they arise. For
example, the mere mention of "horror movies" activates
instances of horror movies and evokes an assessment of
their availability. Similarly, the statement that Woody
Allen's aunt had hoped that he would be a dentist
elicits a comparison of the character to the stereotype
and an assessment of representativeness. It is
presumably the mismatch between Woody Allen's
personality and our stereotype of a dentist that makes
the thought mildly amusing.. Although these assessments
are not tied to the estimation of frequency or
probability, they are likely to play a dominant role
when such judgments are required. The availability of
horror movies may be used to answer the question "What
proportion of the movies produced last year were horror
movies?", and representativeness may control the
judgement that a particular boy is more likely to be an
actor than a dentist.
The term JUDGMENTAL HEURISTIC refers to a strategy -
whether deliberate or not - that relies a natural
assessment to produce an estimation or a prediction.
.Previous discussions or errors of judgement have
focused on deliberate strategies and on
misinterpretations of tasks. The present treatment calls
special attention to the processes of anchoring and
assimilation, which are often neither deliberate nor
conscious. An example from perception may be
instructive: If two objects in a picture of a three-
dimensional scene have the same picture size, the one
that appears more distant is not only seen as "really"
larger but also larger in the picture. The natural
computation of real size evidently influences the (less
natural) judgement of picture size, although observers
are unlikely to confuse the two values or to use the
former to estimate the latter.
The natural assessments of representativeness and
availability do not conform to the extensional logic of
probability theory.'
A. Tversky and D. Kahneman
Extensional Versus Intuitive Reasoning:
The Conjunction Fallacy in Probability Judgment.
Psychological Review Vol 90(4) 1983 p.294
The study of Natural Deduction (Gentzen 1935;Prawitz 1971; Tenant
1990) as a psychological process (1983) is really just the study of
the performance of a skill (like riding a bicycle in fact), which
attempts to account for why some of the difficulties with deduction
per se occur. The best models here may turn out to be connectionist,
where each individual's model ends up being almost unique in its fine
detail. There is a problem for performance theories, as Johnson Laird
and Byrne (1991) point out:
'A major difficulty for performance theories based on
formal logic is that people are affected by the content
of a deductive system..yet formal rules ought to apply
regardless of content. That is what they are: rules that
apply to the logical form of assertions, once it has
been abstracted from their content.'
P. N. Johnson-Laird and R. M. J. Byrne (1991)
Deduction p.31
The theme of this volume up to this point has been that methodological
solipsism is unlikely to reveal much more than the shortcomings and
diversity of social and personal judgment and the context specificity
of behaviour. It took until 1879 for Frege to discover the Predicate
Calculus (Quantification Theory), and a further half century before
Church (1936), Turing (1937) and others laid the foundations for
computer and cognitive science through their collective work on
recursive function theory. From empirical evidence, and developments
in technology, it looks like human and other animal reasoning is
primarily inductive and heuristic, not deductive and algorithmic.
Human beings have considerable difficulties with the latter, and this
is normal. It has taken considerable intellectual effort to discover
formal, abstract, extensional principles, often only with the support
of logic, mathematics and computer technology itself. The empirical
evidence, reviewed in this volume is that extensional principles are
not widely applied except in specific professional capacities which
are domain-specific. In fact, on the simple grounds that the discovery
of such principles required considerable effort should perhaps make us
more ready to accept that they are unlikely to be spontaneously
applied in everyday reasoning and problem solving.
For further coverage of the 'counter-intuitive' nature of deductive
reasoning (and therefore its low frequency in everyday practice) see
Sutherland's 1992 popular survey 'Irrationality', or Plous (1993) for
a recent review of the psychology of judgment and decision making. For
a thorough survey of the rise (and possibly the fall) of Cognitive
Science, see Putnam 1986, or Gardner 1987. The latter concluded his
survey of the Cognitive Revolution within psychology with a short
statement which he referred to as the 'computational paradox'. One
thing that Cognitive Science has shown us is that the computer or
Turing Machine is not a good model of how people reason, at least not
in the Von-Neumann Serial processing sense. Similarly, people do not
seem to think in accordance with the axioms of formal, extensional
logic. Instead, they learn rough and ready heuristics which they which
they try to apply to problems in a very rough, approximate way.
Accordingly, Cognitive Science may well turn to the work of Church,
Turing and other mathematical logicians who, in the wake of Frege,
have worked to elaborate what effective processing is. We will then be
faced with the strange situation of human psychology being of little
practical interest, except as a historical curiosity, an example of
pre-Fregian logic and pre-Church (1936) computation. Behaviour science
will pay as little attention to the 'thoughts and feelings' of 'folk
psychology' as contemporary physics does to quaint notions of 'folk
physics'. For some time, experimental psychologists working within the
information processing (computational) tradition have been working to
replace such concepts such as 'general reasoning capacity' with more
mechanistic notions such as 'Working Memory' (Baddeley 1986):
'This series of studies was concerned with determining
the relationship between general reasoning ability (R)
and general working-memory capacity (WM). In four
studies, with over 2000 subjects, using a variety of
tests to measure reasoning ability and working-memory
capacity, we have demonstrated a consistent and
remarkably high correlation between the two factors. Our
best estimates of the correlation between WM and R were
.82, .88., .80 and .82 for studies 1 through 4
respectively.
...
The finding of such a high correlation between these two
factors may surprise some. Reasoning and working-memory
capacity are thought of differently and they arise from
quite different traditions. Since Spearman (1923),
reasoning has been described as an abstract, high level
process, eluding precise definition. Development of good
tests of reasoning ability has been almost an art form,
owing more to empirical trial-and-error than to a
systematic delineation of the requirements such tests
must satisfy. In contrast, working memory has its roots
in the mechanistic, buffer-storage model of information
processing. Compared to reasoning, short-term storage
has been thought to be a more tractable, demarcated
process.'
P. C. Kyllonen & R. E. Christal (1990)
Reasoning Ability Is (Little More Than) Working-Memory
Capacity
Intelligence 14, 389-433
Such evidence stands well with the logical arguments of Cherniak which
were introduced in Section A, and which are implicit in the following
introductory remarks of Shinghal (1992) on automated reasoning:
'Suppose we are given the following four statements:
1. John awakens;
2. John brings a mop;
3. Mother is delighted, if John awakens and cleans his room;
4. If John brings a mop, then he cleans his room.
The statements being true, we can reason intuitively to
conclude that Mother is delighted. Thus we have deduced
a fact that was not explicitly given in the four
statements. But if we were given many statements, say a
hundred, then intuitive reasoning would be difficult.
Hence we wish to automate reasoning by formalizing it
and implementing it on a computer. It is then usually
called automated theorem proving. To understand
computer-implementable procedures for theorem proving,
one should first understand propositional and predicate
logics, for those logics form the basis of the theorem
proving procedures. It is assumed that you are familiar
with these logics.'
R. Shinghal (1992)
Formal Concepts in Artificial Intelligence: Fundamentals
Ch.2 Automated Reasoning with Propositional Logic p.8
Automated report writing and automated reasoning drawing on actuarial
data is fundamental to the PROBE project. In contrast to such work
using deductive inference, Gluck and Bower (1988) have modelled human
inductive reasoning using artificial neural network technology (which
are heuristic, based on constraint satisfaction/approximation, or
'best fit' rather than being 'production rule' based). That is, it is
unlikely that anyone spontaneously reasons using truth-tables or the
Resolution Rule (Robinson 1965). Furthermore, Rescorla (1988), perhaps
the dominant US spokesman for research in Pavlovian Conditioning, has
drawn attention to the fact that Classical Conditioning should perhaps
be seen as the experimental modelling of inductive inferential
'cognitive' heuristic processes. Throughout this paper, it is being
argued that such inductive inferences are in fact best modelled using
artificial neural network technology, and that such processing is
intensional, with all of the traditional problems of intensionality:
'Connectionist networks are well suited to everyday
common sense reasoning. Their ability to simultaneously
satisfy soft constraints allows them to select from
conflicting information in finding a plausible
interpretation of a situation. However, these networks
are poor at reasoning using the standard semantics of
classical logic, based on truth in all possible models.'
M. Derthick (1990)
Mundane Reasoning by Settling on a Plausible Model
Artificial Intelligence 46,1990,107-157
and perhaps even more familiarly:
'Induction should come with a government health warning.
A baby girl of sixteen months hears the word 'snow' used
to refer to snow. Over the next months, as Melissa
Bowerman has observed, the infant uses the word to refer
to: snow, the white tail of a horse, the white part of a
toy boat, a white flannel bed pad, and a puddle of milk
on the floor. She is forming the impression that 'snow'
refers to things that are white or to horizontal areas
of whiteness, and she will gradually refine her concept
so that it tallies with the adult one. The underlying
procedure is again inductive.'
P. N. Johnson-Laird (1988)
Induction, Concepts and Probability p.238: The Computer
and The Mind
--
David Longley
David Longley
Another way of 'explaining common-sense' is as *lucky guesses* <g>.
More specifically:
LOGIC VS. COMMON SENSE
'One of the major methodological problems of clinical
psychology concerns the relation between the "clinical"
and "statistical" (or "actuarial") methods of
prediction. Without prejudging the question as to
whether these methods are fundamentally different, we
can at least set forth the main difference between them
as it appears superficially. The problem is to predict
how a person is going to behave. In what manner should
we go about this prediction?
We may order the individual to a class or set of classes
on the basis of objective facts concerning his life
history, his scores on psychometric tests, behavior
ratings or check lists, or subjective judgements gained
from interviews. The combination of all these data
enables us to CLASSIFY the subject; and once having made
such a classification, we enter a statistical or
actuarial table which gives the statistical frequencies
of behaviors of various sorts for persons belonging to
the class. The mechanical combining of information for
classification purposes, and the resultant probability
figure which is an empirically determined relative
frequency, are the characteristics that define the
actuarial or statistical type of prediction.
Alternatively, we may proceed on what seems, at least,
to be a very different path. On the basis of interview
impressions, other data from the history, and possibly
also psychometric information of the same type as in the
first sort of prediction, we formulate, as a psychiatric
staff conference, some psychological hypothesis
regarding the structure and the dynamics of this
particular individual. On the basis of this hypothesis
and certain reasonable expectations as to the course of
other events, we arrive at a prediction of what is going
to happen. This type of procedure has been loosely
called the clinical or case-study method of prediction'.
P. E. Meehl (1954)
The Problem: Clinical vs. Statistical Prediction
'In the clinical method the decision-maker combines or
processes information in his or her head. In the
actuarial or statistical method the human judge is
eliminated and conclusions rest solely on empirically
established relations between data and the condition or
event of interest. A life insurance agent uses the
clinical method if data on risk factors are combined
through personal judgement. The agent uses the actuarial
method if data are entered into a formula, or tables and
charts that contain empirical information relating these
background data to life expectancy.
Clinical judgement should not be equated with a clinical
setting or a clinical practitioner. A clinician in
psychiatry or medicine may use the clinical or actuarial
method. Conversely, the actuarial method should not be
equated with automated decision rules alone. For
example, computers can automate clinical judgements. The
computer can be programmed to yield the description
"dependency traits", just as the clinical judge would,
whenever a certain response appears on a psychological
test. To be truly actuarial, interpretations must be
both automatic (that is, prespecified or routinized) and
based on empirically established relations.'
R. Dawes, D. Faust & P. Meehl (1989)
Clinical Versus Actuarial Judgement Science v243, pp
1668-1674 (1989)
As long ago as 1941, Lundberg made it clear that any argument between
those committed to the 'clinical' (intuitive) stance and those arguing
for the 'actuarial' (statistical) was a pseudo-argument, since all the
clinician could possibly be making his or her decision on was his or
her limited experience (database) of past cases and outcomes.
'I have no objection to Stouffer's statement that "if
the case-method were not effective, life insurance
companies hardly would use it as they do in
supplementing their actuarial tables by a medical
examination of the applicant in order to narrow their
risks." I do not see, however, that this constitutes a
"supplementing" of actuarial tables. It is rather the
essential task of creating specific actuarial tables. To
be sure, we usually think of actuarial tables as being
based on age alone. But on the basis of what except
actuarial study has it been decided to charge a higher
premium (and how much) for a "case" twenty pounds
overweight, alcoholic, with a certain family history,
etc.? These case-studies have been classified and the
experience for each class noted until we have arrived at
a body of actuarial knowledge on the basis of which we
"predict" for each new case. The examination of the new
case is for the purpose of classifying him as one of a
certain class for which prediction is possible.'
G. Lundberg (1941)
Case Studies vs. Statistical Methods - An Issue Based
on Misunderstanding. Sociometry v4 pp379-83 (1941)
A few years later, Meehl (1954), drawing on the work of Lundberg
(1941) and Sarbin (1941) in reviewing the relative merits of clinical
vs. statistical prediction (judgement) reiterated the point that all
judgements about an individual are always referenced to a class, they
are always therefore, probability judgements.
'No predictions made about a single case in clinical
work are ever certain, but are always probable. The
notion of probability is inherently a frequency notion,
hence statements about the probability of a given event
are statements about frequencies, although they may not
seem to be so. Frequencies refer to the occurrence of
events in a class; therefore all predictions; even those
that from their appearance seem to be predictions about
individual concrete events or persons, have actually an
implicit reference to a class....it is only if we have a
reference class to which the event in question can be
ordered that the possibility of determining or
estimating a relative frequency exists.. the clinician,
if he is doing anything that is empirically meaningful,
is doing a second-rate job of actuarial prediction.
There is fundamentally no logical difference between the
clinical or case-study method and the actuarial method.
The only difference is on two quantitative continua,
namely that the actuarial method is more EXPLICIT and
more PRECISE.'
P. Meehl (1954)
Clinical vs. Statistical Prediction:
A Theoretical Analysis and a Review of the Evidence
There has, unfortunately, over the years, been a strong degree of
resistance to the actuarial approach. It must be appreciated however,
that the technology to support comprehensive actuarial analysis and
judgment has only been physically available since the 1940s with the
invention of the computer. Practically speaking, it has only been
available on the scale we are now discussing since the late 1970s with
the development of sophisticated DBMS's (databases with query
languages based on the Predicate Calculus; Codd 1970; Gray 1984;
Gardarin and Valduriez 1989, Date 1992), and the development and mass
production of powerful and cheap microcomputers. Minsky and Papert
(1988) in their expanded edition of 'Perceptrons' (basic pattern
recognition systems) in fact wrote:
'The goal of this study is to reach a deeper
understanding of some concepts we believe are crucial to
the general theory of computation. We will study in
great detail a class of computations that make decisions
by weighting evidence.....The people we want most to
speak to are interested in that general theory of
computation.'
M. L. Minsky & S. A. Papert (1969,1990)
Perceptrons p.1
The 'general theory of computation' is, as elaborated elsewhere,
'Recursive Function Theory' (Church 1936, Kleene 1936, Turing 1937),
and is essentially the approach being advocated here as evidential
behaviourism, or eliminative materialism which eschews psychologism
and intensionalism. Nevertheless, as late as 1972, Meehl still found
he had to say:
'I think it is time for those who resist drawing any
generalisation from the published research, by
fantasising about what WOULD happen if studies of a
different sort WERE conducted, to do them. I claim that
this crude, pragmatic box score IS important, and that
those who deny its importance do so because they just
don't like the way it comes out. There are few issues in
clinical, personality, or social psychology (or, for
that matter, even in such fields as animal learning) in
which the research trends are as uniform as this one.
Amazingly, this strong trend seems to exert almost no
influence upon clinical practice, even, you may be
surprised to learn, in Minnesota!...
It would be ironic indeed (but not in the least
surprising to one acquainted with the sociology of our
profession) if physicians in nonpsychiatric medicine
should learn the actuarial lesson from biometricians and
engineers, whilst the psychiatrist continues to muddle
through with inefficient combinations of unreliable
judgements because he has not been properly instructed
by his colleagues in clinical psychology, who might have
been expected to take the lead in this development.
I understand (anecdotally) that there are two other
domains, unrelated to either personality assessment or
the healing arts, in which actuarial methods of data
combination seem to do at least as good a job as the
traditional impressionistic methods: namely, meteorology
and the forecasting of security prices. From my limited
experience I have the impression that in these fields
also there is a strong emotional resistance to
substituting formalised techniques for human judgement.
Personally, I look upon the "formal-versus-judgmental"
issue as one of great generality, not confined to the
clinical context. I do not see why clinical
psychologists should persist in using inefficient means
of combining data just because investment brokers,
physicians, and weathermen do so. Meanwhile, I urge
those who find the box score "35:0" distasteful to
publish empirical studies filling in the score board
with numbers more to their liking.'
P. E. Meehl (1972)
When Shall We Use Our Heads Instead of the Formula?
PSYCHODIAGNOSIS: Collected Papers (1971)
In 1982, Kahneman, Slovic and Tversky, in their collection of papers
on (clinical) judgement under conditions of uncertainty, prefaced the
book with the following:
'Meehl's classic book, published in 1954, summarised
evidence for the conclusion that simple linear
combinations of cues outdo the intuitive judgements of
experts in predicting significant behavioural criteria.
The lasting intellectual legacy of this work, and of the
furious controversy that followed it, was probably not
the demonstration that clinicians performed poorly in
tasks that, as Meehl noted, they should not have
undertaken. Rather, it was the demonstration of a
substantial discrepancy between the objective record of
people's success in prediction tasks and the sincere
beliefs of these people about the quality of their
performance. This conclusion was not restricted to
clinicians or to clinical prediction:
People's impressions of how they reason, and how well
they reason, could not be taken at face value.'
D. Kahneman, P. Slovic & A. Tversky (1982)
Judgment Under Conditions of Uncertainty: Heuristics and
Biases
Earlier in 1977, reviewing the Attribution Theory literature evidence
on individuals' access to the reasons for their behaviours, Nisbett
and Wilson (1977) summarised the work as follows:
'................................... there may be little
or no direct introspective access to higher order
cognitive processes. Ss are sometimes (a) unaware of the
existence of a stimulus that importantly influenced a
response, (b) unaware of the existence of the response,
and (c) unaware that the stimulus has affected the
response. It is proposed that when people attempt to
report on their cognitive processes, that is, on the
processes mediating the effects of a stimulus on a
response, they do not do so on the basis of any true
introspection. Instead, their reports are based on a
priori, implicit causal theories, or judgments about the
extent to which a particular stimulus is a plausible
cause of a given response. This suggests that though
people may not be able to observe directly their
cognitive processes, they will sometimes be able to
report accurately about them. Accurate reports will
occur when influential stimuli are salient and are
plausible causes of the responses they produce, and will
not occur when stimuli are not salient or are not
plausible causes.'
R. Nisbett & T. Wilson (1977)
Telling More Than We Can Know: Public Reports on Private
Processes
Such rules of thumb or attributions, are of course the intensional
heuristics studied by Tversky and Kahneman (1973), or the 'function
approximations' computed by neural network systems discussed earlier
as connection weights (both in artificial and real neural nets, cf.
Kandel's work with Aplysia).
Mathematical logicians such as Putnam (1975,1988); Elgin 1990 and
Devitt (1990) have long been arguing that psychologists may, as
Skinner (1971,1974) argued consistently, be looking for their data in
the wrong place. Despite the empirical evidence from research in
psychology on the problems of self report, and a good deal more drawn
from decision making in medical diagnosis, the standard means of
obtaining information for 'reports' on inmates for purposes of review,
and the standard means of assessing inmates for counselling is on the
basis of clinical interview. In the Prison Service this makes little
sense, since it is possible to directly observe behaviour under
relatively natural conditions of everyday activities. The clinical
interview, is still the basis of much of the work of the Prison
Psychologist despite the literature on fallibility of self-reports,
and the fallibility and unwitting distortions of those making
judgments in such contexts has been consistently documented within
psychology:
'The previous review of this field (Slovic, Fischoff &
Lichtenstein 1977) described a long list of human
judgmental biases, deficiencies, and cognitive
illusions. In the intervening period this list has both
increased in size and influenced other areas of
psychology (Bettman 1979, Mischel 1979, Nisbett & Ross
1980).'
H. Einhorn and R. Hogarth (1981)
The following are also taken from the text:
'If one considers the rather typical findings that
clinical judgments tend to be (a) rather unreliable (in
at least two of the three senses of that term), (b) only
minimally related to the confidence and amount of
experience of the judge, (c) relatively unaffected by
the amount of information available to the judge, and
(d) rather low in validity on an absolute basis, it
should come as no great surprise that such judgments are
increasingly under attack by those who wish to
substitute actuarial prediction systems for the human
judge in many applied settings....I can summarize this
ever-growing body of literature by pointing out that
over a very large array of clinical judgment tasks
(including by now some which were specifically selected
to show the clinician at his best and the actuary at his
worst), rather simple actuarial formulae typically can
be constructed to perform at a level no lower than that
of the clinical expert.'
L. R. Goldberg (1968)
Simple models or simple processes?
Some research on clinical judgments
American Psychologist, 1968, 23(7) p.483-496
'The various studies can thus be viewed as repeated
sampling from a uniform universe of judgement tasks
involving the diagnosis and predication of human
behavior. Lacking complete knowledge of the elements
that constitute this universe, representativeness cannot
be determined precisely. However, with a sample of about
100 studies and the same outcome obtained in almost
every case, it is reasonable to conclude that the
actuarial advantage is not exceptional but general and
likely to encompass many of the unstudied judgement
tasks. Stated differently, if one poses the query:
Would an actuarial procedure developed for a particular
judgement task (say, predicting academic success at my
institution) equal or exceed the clinical method?", the
available research places the odds solidly in favour of
an affirmative reply. "There is no controversy in social
science that shows such a large body of qualitatively
diverse studies coming out so uniformly....as this one
(Meehl J. Person. Assess, 50,370 (1986)".'
The distinction between collecting observations and integrating it is
further brought out vividly by Meehl (1989):
'Surely we all know that the human brain is poor at
weighting and computing. When you check out at a
supermarket you don't eyeball the heap of purchases and
say to the clerk, "well it looks to me as if it's about
$17.00 worth; what do you think?" The clerk adds it up.
There are no strong arguments....from empirical
studies.....for believing that human beings can assign
optimal weight in equations subjectively or that they
apply their own weights consistently.'
P. Meehl (1986)
Causes and effects of my disturbing little book
J Person. Assess. 50,370-5,1986
'Distributional information, or base-rate data, consist
of knowledge about the distribution of outcomes in
similar situations. In predicting the sales of a new
novel, for example, what one knows about the author, the
style, and the plot is singular information, whereas
what one knows about the sales of novels is
distributional information. Similarly, in predicting the
longevity of a patient, the singular information
includes his age, state of health, and past medical
history, whereas the distributional information consists
of the relevant population statistics. The singular
information consists of the relevant features of the
problem that distinguish it from others, while the
distributional information characterises the outcomes
that have been observed in cases of the same general
class. The present concept of distributional data does
not coincide with the Bayesian concept of a prior
probability distribution. The former is defined by the
nature of the data, whereas the latter is defined in
terms of the sequence of information acquisition.
The tendency to neglect distributional information and
to rely mainly on singular information is enhanced by
any factor that increases the perceived uniqueness of
the problem. The relevance of distributional data can be
masked by detailed acquaintance with the specific case
or by intense involvement with it........
The prevalent tendency to underweigh or ignore
distributional information is perhaps the major error of
intuitive prediction. The consideration of
distributional information, of course, does not
guarantee the accuracy of forecasts. It does, however,
provide some protection against completely unrealistic
predictions. The analyst should therefore make every
effort to frame the forecasting problem so as to
facilitate utilising all the distributional information
that is available to the expert.'
A. Tversky & D. Kahneman (1983)
Extensional Versus Intuitive Reasoning: The Conjunction
Fallacy in Probability Judgment Psychological Review
v90(4) 1983
'The possession of unique observational capacities
clearly implies that human input or interaction is often
needed to achieve maximal predictive accuracy (or to
uncover potentially useful variables) but tempts us to
draw an additional, dubious inference. A unique capacity
to observe is not the same as a unique capacity to
predict on the basis of integration of observations. As
noted earlier, virtually any observation can be coded
quantitatively and thus subjected to actuarial analysis.
As Einhorn's study with pathologists and other research
shows, greater accuracy may be achieved if the skilled
observer performs this function and then steps aside,
leaving the interpretation of observational and other
data to the actuarial method.'
R. Dawes, D. Faust and P. Meehl (1989)
ibid.
--
David Longley
Neil Rickert
>In article <4jv246$6...@mp.cs.niu.edu> ric...@cs.niu.edu "Neil Rickert" writes:
> 'My study of the CONTENT of a theory (or of any
> statement whatsoever) was based on the simple and
> obvious idea that the informative content of the
> CONJUNCTION, ab, of any two statements, a, and b, will
> always be greater than, or at least equal to, that of
> its components.
That idea does not seem to be at all obvious. First of all, it is
not at all obvious that one can equate a theory with a simple
prediction.
If we ignore that problem, and we take the statement a to be a
logical proposition, with a value of true or false, then it
represents at most 1 bit of information. Likewise b represents at
most 1 bit of information. The conjunction ab also is at most 1 bit
of information. If b happens to be the identically false statement,
then arguably it contains 0 bits of information, and so does ab. It
seems obvious that ab contains no more information than either a or
b.
> Let a be the statement 'It will rain on Friday'; b the
> statement 'It will be fine on Saturday'; and ab the
> statement 'It will rain on Friday and it will be fine on
> Saturday': it is then obvious that the informative
> content of this last statement, the conjunction ab, will
> exceed that of its component a and also that of its
> component b.
With that example, we can gain a better idea of what Popper is
talking about. In spite of what he says, he is not concerned with
the statement 'it will rain on Friday'. Rather, he is concerned with
the knowledge that the statement is true. So the information he is
referring to is not the statement, but the knowledge of the truth of
that statement. Interpreted that way, then Popper's claim as to
informative content is reasonable.
> And it will also be obvious that the
> probability of ab (or, what is the same, the probability
> that ab will be true) will be smaller than that of
> either of its components.
There is again something wrong. If we are really talking not about
the statement a, but about the knowledge that a is true, then we are
taking the probability of a is 1. Likewise we are taking the
probability of b to be 1. In that case if follows that the
probability of ab is also 1. So Popper's argument seems to fail.
Ken Ewell
>Another way of 'explaining common-sense' is as *lucky guesses* <g>.
>More specifically:
And David Longley, in usual style goes on to post at great length,
snippets and quotations from those upon which he continues his
mistakes.
All has been snipped.
I suppose David Longely, and he is not alone, has made it his purpose,
nay his lofty goal, to oft repeat the same dis-satisfactions to any
man or woman who might claim that they value their own common sense
above all else. Whatever the rules of reasoned debate, they do not
include senselessly repeating the dogma of the day.
It comes down to this:
The kind of abstruse psychology of understanding doggedly propounded
by David Longely can never hope to gain any influence over the
behaivor it purportedly hopes to define. The feelings of one's heart
readily serve to dissipate all of its conclusions. And while I am
probably paraphrasing, while consciously suppressing the urge to quote
some famous personage whose opinions might be held more vauable than
my own, I am in no need of such a defense against the weak and
unproductive arguments and objections that David presents.
Moreover, while I have already granted that Longely's view can be
useful in some authoritative endeavors, it will never lead to greater
understanding of "human understanding" for (if I may engage in a
metaphor) one can not approach the concept of the great forest
because: a) of the required and fatiguing examination of all of its
trees, and b) only Oaks, Elms, and Cherry trees are allowed; if one
encounters a Palm or Fir, they are to be ignored. This is what
"Fragments..." means.
David, it is possible to construe man as a reasonable rather than a
criminal being; in this way one can endeavor to form his understanding
rather than reform his behavior.
Your view as a behavior scientist is probably not inclusive enough to
admit to reason and to sense, and your objections and arguments,
although well-informed, are unproductive and weak.
The main weakness being that all your objections are based upon a
natural weakness of human understanding itself. I know of no person
who will deny this as a matter of fact; no person who will admit they
are not themselves subject to this weakness.
Yet in everyday life, we continuously reason about every fact and
every existence presented to the sensibilites. We cannot possibly
subsist without engaging in this form of intimate argument. Any
objections to this sort of common sense, being derived therefrom,
cannot be sufficent to overthrow it.
In this light it may be best to keep your objections within your
proper sphere. Your arguments and objections have no basis here.
It is not even so much a matter of experience, for the mind has
nothing present to it other than its perceptions and some minds cannot
reach any experience, let alone explanation or understanding, of the
connection between any object of perception and the perception itself.
This is the issue, this is the matter of fact, with which we should
occupy our attention. And if you would be so kind as to address the
questions I raised thrice, thus far, without any suitable answer, you
would find that such a philosophy of science as you assert over and
over would fail to produce any insight whatsoever.
Ken Ewell
David Longley
mit...@readware.com "Ken Ewell" writes:
> David Longley <Da...@longley.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> >Another way of 'explaining common-sense' is as *lucky guesses* <g>.
> >More specifically:
>
> And David Longley, in usual style goes on to post at great length,
> snippets and quotations from those upon which he continues his
> mistakes.
>
> All has been snipped.
>
> I suppose David Longely, and he is not alone, has made it his purpose,
> nay his lofty goal, to oft repeat the same dis-satisfactions to any
> man or woman who might claim that they value their own common sense
> above all else. Whatever the rules of reasoned debate, they do not
> include senselessly repeating the dogma of the day.
>
> It comes down to this:
>
> The kind of abstruse psychology of understanding doggedly propounded
> by David Longely can never hope to gain any influence over the
> behaivor it purportedly hopes to define. The feelings of one's heart
> readily serve to dissipate all of its conclusions. And while I am
> probably paraphrasing, while consciously suppressing the urge to quote
> some famous personage whose opinions might be held more vauable than
> my own, I am in no need of such a defense against the weak and
> unproductive arguments and objections that David presents.
The following is extracted from the introductory chapter to a
relatively recent collection of papers in the area of reasoning
and decision making. The reference is:
"Reasoning and Decision Making"
Edited by P.N. Johnson-Laird and Eldar Shafir
A "Cognition" Special Issue (1993)
I hope citing it will help offset the distorted assesments which
have been made of the position I have outlined over recent years.
My public contribution to correcting what I see as a virulent
'intensionalism' within contemporary professional (ie applied)
psychology can be read in 'Fragments of Behaviour: The
Extensional Stance' which is available (along with a summary text
and some critical reviews by colleagues) at:
http://www.uni-hamburg.de/~kriminol/TS/tskr.htm
///////////
"In sum, the major psychological discovery about both
reasoning and decision making is that normative theory
and psychological facts pass each other by. People are
not intuitive logicians, intuitive statisticians, or
intuitive rational decision theorists. Instead, the
precise character of their thoughts and decisions is the
outcome of complex and unobservable mental processes,
the nature of which researchers in both these areas of
inquiry are trying to elucidate."
o o o o o o o
"In order to decide, judge,
in order to judge, reason;
in order to reason, decide (what to reason about).
Reasoning and decision making are high-level
cognitive skills that have been under intensive
investigation by psychologists and philosophers, among
others, for the last thirty years. But, methods and
theories have developed separately in the two fields so
that distinct traditions have grown with little to say
to one another. The aim of this special issue of
Cognition is to encourage and help workers in these two
traditions to understand one another's research and to
reflect and enhance some recent signs of "crosstalk"
between them.
It seemed to us high time to consider the growing
interactions between reasoning and decision making for
at least three reasons. First, the two abilities are
often interwoven in real life, at least according to the
common-sense view epitomized in the maxim at the head of
this introduction. Second, their study has led to
striking parallels in the conclusions that investigators
have reached and to the recent signs of crosstalk.
Third, the two fields have important lessons for each
other. We will explore each of these reasons before we
introduce the papers in this special issue. We begin
with a sketch of the everyday assumptions that relate
reasoning and decision making - a background that we
will defend, though it is sometimes disparaged by
philosophers as "folk psychology".
The "folk" psychology of reasoning and decision making
Human beings have desires and needs, and they use
their knowledge to decide what to do and to infer how
best to achieve their goals. They reason in order to
make decisions and to justify them both to themselves
and others; they reason in order to determine the
consequences of their beliefs and of their hypothetical
actions; they reason to work out plans of action. They
make decisions about what values to treat as paramount;
they make decisions about what actions to take; and they
make decisions about what information to base their
reasoning on. Hence there is an interdependence between
reasoning and decision making. They are, as computer
scientists say, mutually recursive.
This account of reasons and decisions is part of
"folk psychology", that is. the view that most
individuals in our culture accept about mental life.
Philosophers and others have a variety of views about
folk psychology. Thus, at one extreme. Ramsey
(1926/1990) brought together three of its fundamental
concepts - truth probability, and value - in a profound
synthesis. At another extreme however certain
philosophers reject folk psychology wholesale. Terms
such as "belief" and "desire", they say, do not refer to
any substantive entities. They are theoretical terms
much like "phlogiston" or "ether", which will be
replaced once science has succeeded in determining the
real underpinnings of behavior. People may use folk
psychology to predict their own and other individuals'
actions, but, say the critics, the theory itself is
incorrigible - it is not responsive to evidence; it is
not a scientific theory. The proper study of the mind is
instead brain, nerve, and synapse (e.g., Churchland,
1984; Stich, 1983). At the heart of these critiques
seems to lie a common philosophical skepticism about
'intentional objects', that is, mental representations
that have content and that are about something.
Students of reasoning and decision making do not
generally regard assumptions about beliefs, desires, and
values with total skepticism, but they are suspicious of
one component of folk psychology; the myth of perfect
awareness. Unlike cognitive and social psychologists,
most people believe that their conscious feelings and
judgments control their actions. The claim is a legacy
of the Cartesian identification of the mind with
consciousness. Nothing is easier according to this
principle than to know the contents of your mind:
introspection will deliver them to you as part of your
immediate experience. But to what extent can you be
aware of the causes of your behavior? There is probably
no way to answer this question for any particular
action. That is the problem that historians face. But
the psychological study of reasoning and decision making
has answered the question for replicable classes of
action. individuals are often not aware of how they
reason, having at best only glimpses of the process.
They are aware of the results, not the mechanism. What
they say about their reasoning does not tally with its
real nature (e.g., Wason & Evans, 1975). Likewise, as
Nisbett and RosS (1980) have argued, people often are
not aware of the real basis of their decisions. For
example, Nisbett and Wilson (1977) asked shoppers in a
mall to rate the quality of four nightgowns. Most
subjects favored whichever was the last gown that they
had examined, while attributing their preference to some
property of the nightgown itself, rather than its
position in the sequence.....
Yet, the imperfections of introspection do not
imply that all aspects of folk psychology are illusory.
Individuals do have access to goals, feelings, and
values. Introspection makes available to them what they
are thinking, and in this way, as Ericsson and Simon
(1980) contend, it can provide clues to the underlying
process. People regularly ascribe truth values to
assertions. As long as this practice is not entirely
suspect, then it is hard to see how there could be
anything dUbious about the idea that an individual holds
an assertion to be true (or false). And thus the
concept of belief remains in the domain of respectable
discourse. It is true, nonetheless, that introspection
is not a direct route to understanding mental processes,
and, as far as we know, there is no direct route. That
is why psychologists studying reasoning and decision
making are committed to experimental investigations
rather than to introspection and a priori analysis (also
known as 'indoor ornithology').
Normative theories are not psychological theories
Normative theories have been proposed both for
reasoning and for decision making. They are intended to
specify what count as rational inferences and rational
decisions. In the case of reasoning, the normative
theory is formal logic, and many theorists have argued
that it does indeed provide an account of human
deductive competence (e.g., Beth & Piaget, 1966;
Cherniak, 1986; Henle, 1962 Macnamara, 1986). There are,
however, three difficulties with this proposal. First,
which logic gives the normative account? Logic is not a
monolithic enterprise particularly if it is to embrace
reasoning with modal terms such as possibly and
"necessarily": there are probably an infinite number of
distinct modal logics (Hughes & Cresswell, 1968).
Perhaps none of them is relevant to human competence,
because an assertion, such as:
It is raining and possibly it is not raining
is not a self-contradiction in any of these logics, as
it seems to be in everyday language, which distinguishes
between this assertion and the following "counter-
factual one:
It is raining, but it might not have been raining.
Second, logic gives no account of which valid conclusion
to draw. From any set of Premises there are always
infinitely many conclusions that follow validly, that is
they must be true given that the premises are true. Most
of these conclusions are trivial, and it would hardly be
rational to infer them. For example, given the following
premises:
If it is raining, then there is no need to water the plants.
It is raining.
a sensible, rational, conclusion is:
There is no need to water the plants.
But any of the following conclusions are valid too:
It is raining or it is not raining.
It is raining or it is snowing.
It is raining or cats and dogs are falling out of the sky.
and so on.
Logic alone cannot determine which of the
infinitely many valid conclusions are sensible to draw.
Strangely, the theories that adopt logic as their
account of deductive competence have almost universally
overlooked this problem. Human reasoners seem naturally
to infer conclusions that are parsimonious, that make
information explicit that was not stated as such in the
premises, and that do not throw information away by
adding disjunctive alternatives (see Johnson-Laird &
Byrne, 1991 ).
Whatever the definition of competence, human
reasoners do make deductive errors. Yet, there have been
many attempts to save the hypothesis that they are
logically impeccable. The idea was first formulated by
philosophers, perhaps on the grounds that humans are
made in God's image. More recently, Henle (1962) has
argued that apparent mistakes in reasoning do not impugn
the underlying mechanism: individuals are reasoning
validly, but they have forgotten a premise.
reinterpreted a premise, or imported some additional
premise. Similarly, Cohen (1981) has argued that the
underlying competence cannot be at fault: there is
merely a malfunction in the mechanism. The evidence
suggests otherwise. Reasoners make errors in cases
where there are no grounds for supposing that they have
forgotten the premises, distorted them, or added new
premises. Their errors are systematic and predictable,
and they will even concede that they have erred. The
phenomena do not imply that human beings are
irredeemably irrational - after all, they are sensible
enough to recognize their shortcomings and to devise
formal logic as a device for testing the validity of
their inferences. Systematic errors in deduction are
compatible with the notion that deductive competence
rests on the semantic principle of validity. According
to this notion an inference is valid if its conclusion
must be true given that its premises are true Human
beings appear to grasp this idea (at least tacitly), but
they do not always have the mental resources to pursue
it properly, and so they fall into error. This idea lies
at the heart of the mental model theory of reasoning,
which is outlined in this issue (see the paper by
Legrenzi, Girotto, & Johnson-Laird).
In the case of decision making, the classical
normative account is expected utilitY theory (EUT),
wherein the value of an alternative consists of the sum
of the utilities of its outcomes, each weighted by its
probability. Modern EUT was developed by von Neumann and
Morgenstern ( 1947), who showed that if individuals'
preferences satisfy a number of simple axioms, then
their behavior can be described and justified as
maximizing expected utility. Besides some more technical
points, the axiomatic analysis reflects the following
substantive assumptions about decisions (for further
discussion, see Tversky & Kahneman, 1986, and references
therein; in what follows we adopt their terminology,
although these notions appear in a number of different
guises elsewhere):
Cancellation: Any state of the world that yields the
same outcome regardless of one's choice should be
"cancelled", or eliminated from further consideration.
Thus, choice between options should depend only on those
states in which they yield different outcomes.
Transitivity: For any alternatives x, y, and z, if x is
preferred to y, and y is preferred to z, then x must be
preferred to z.
Dominance: If one option is better than another in one
state of the world and at least as good in all other
states, then the dominant option should be chosen.
Invariance: Different but logically identical
representations of the same choice problem, or
different methods of eliciting a choice, should yield
the same preferences.
Just as the study of judgment has shown that humans
are not intuitive Bayesian statisticians .... so too
studies of decision making have shown that people are
not intuitive utility maximizers. Research in behavioral
decision theory has documented systematic and
predictable violations of the above assumptions.
Perhaps the most basic assumption is that of invariance,
which requires strategically equivalent methods of
elicitation and logically identical descriptions of the
options to yield the same preferences. Violations of
invariance have now been documented in numerous domains,
in hypothetical as well as real world situations, with
both high and low stakes, and both with and without
monetary incentives as illustrated by Tversky and
Kahneman (1986), violations of invariance themselves
suffice to generate violations of cancellation and
dominance. Some violations of transitivity have also
been documented (Tversky 1969), and are most likely to
arise in decisions based on multiple criteria. They can
also occur in collective behavior, as illustrated by
well-known paradoxes in social choice (e.g., Arrow,
1963).
Certain assumptions of rational choice have had
more normative appeal than others. Thus, while the
assumption of invariance is indispensable for a
normative account, the cancellation and transitivity
conditions have been challenged by some theorists. The
notion that humans abide by normative principles dies
hard especially amongst economists and philosophers (see
Hogarth & Reder, 1986, for a good discussion.) As a
consequence of this tension, several theories have been
proposed that retain some of the more normatively
appealing principles, like invariance, while relaxing
others, such as cancellation and transitivity (for
reviews, see Camerer, 1993; Machina, 1982; Schoemaker,
1982). Their apparent aim is to tailor a normative
account to fit observed behavior. Naturally, as evidence
continues to accumulate documenting the violation of
even the most essential principles, decision theorists,
like students of human reasoning, will have to accept
the irreconcilability of the normative and the
descriptive accounts.
In sum, the major psychological discovery about
both reasoning and decision making is that normative
theory and psychological facts pass each other by.
People are not intuitive logicians, intuitive
statisticians, or intuitive rational decision theorists.
Instead, the precise character of their thoughts and
decisions is the outcome of complex and unobservable
mental processes, the nature of which researchers in
both these areas of inquiry are trying to elucidate.
Some lessons from the study of reasoning and decision
making
A significant lesson from the study of reasoning
is that theories of mental processes should be
computable, that is, sufficiently explicit that, in
principle. they could be modeled in computer programs.
Indeed, many researchers have implemented their theories
in computer programs............. The practice helps to
ensure that theorists are not taking too much for
granted and that their theories are not vague,
incoherent, or, like mystical insights, only properly
understood by their proponents. The effort to develop a
computable theory concentrates the theorist i mind on
the nature of underlying mental processes; it alerts the
theorist to the design of mental architecture (Newell,
1990) and to the puzzle of how intellectual strategies
might develop. Similarly. since programs should not be
equated with theories. there can be a dialectical
improvement in the theories: what a program does is not
as important as the effects its development may have on
the theorist's thinking
A significant lesson from the study of decision
making is the need for experiments to examine realistic
problems. It is of limited interest to investigate text-
book examples if they are so artificial and so remote
from the exigencies of daily life that subjects are
likely to adopt strategies that are otherwise alien to
their everyday thinking. The result will be a burgeoning
literature that is largely irrelevant to the real nature
of thinking. In contrast, students of decision making
have investigated among others, the decisions of doctors
about treatments, of gamblers in casinos, and of
customers in shopping malls. Similarly, many of the
laboratory studies, while hypothetical in nature, show
an enhanced sensitivity to the verisimilitude of their
tasks.
Another lesson from the study of decision making
is the three-fold distinction that theorists draw among
normative, descriptive and prescriptive accounts (e.g.,
Bell, Raiffa, & Tversky, 1988). The customary
distinction is between the normative (how one ought to
proceed) and the descriptive (how one in fact proceeds).
But, if individuals are to be helped to improve their
performance in daily life, it is unrealistic to hope
that this may be achieved simply by teaching them
decision theory. Recommendations need to go beyond
normative and descriptive accounts and to advocate
measures that actually help people make better
decisions. Such prescriptive measures are likely not to
fall neatly into either the normative or descriptive
categories. If a decision problem is affected by the way
in which it is framed, then a combination of the
alternative frames into a single description may not
overcome the effect: one frame may still be more salient
than the other (cf. McNeil, Pauker, & Tversky, 1988). At
that point, the best that decision makers can do is to
examine their preferences from the different
perspectives and, aware of the normative-descriptive
tension, reason about the best way of reaching a
decision. The development of effective prescriptions to
overcome such difficulties calls for further thinking
and analysis on the part of both lay people and
researchers."
Philip Johnson-Laird, and Eldar Shafir (1993)
The Interaction Between Reasoning and Decision Making: An Introduction
--
David Longley
Neil Rickert
>The following is extracted from the introductory chapter to a
>relatively recent collection of papers in the area of reasoning
>and decision making. The reference is:
> "Reasoning and Decision Making"
> Edited by P.N. Johnson-Laird and Eldar Shafir
> A "Cognition" Special Issue (1993)
Thanks for posting it.
>I hope citing it will help offset the distorted assesments which
>have been made of the position I have outlined over recent years.
What you posted supports the position I have been arguing very well.
David Longley
> In <828913...@longley.demon.co.uk> David Longley <Da...@longley.demon.co.uk>
> writes:
>
> >The following is extracted from the introductory chapter to a
> >relatively recent collection of papers in the area of reasoning
> >and decision making. The reference is:
>
> > "Reasoning and Decision Making"
> > Edited by P.N. Johnson-Laird and Eldar Shafir
> > A "Cognition" Special Issue (1993)
>
> Thanks for posting it.
>
> >I hope citing it will help offset the distorted assesments which
> >have been made of the position I have outlined over recent years.
>
> What you posted supports the position I have been arguing very well.
>
>
I guess *anything* might be taken to support your position on the grounds that:
1) you don't subscribe to the falsifiability principle
2) you have not made your own position clear
--
David Longley
David Longley
Da...@longley.demon.co.uk "David Longley" writes:
>
> "In sum, the major psychological discovery about both
> reasoning and decision making is that normative theory
> and psychological facts pass each other by. People are
> not intuitive logicians, intuitive statisticians, or
> intuitive rational decision theorists. Instead, the
> precise character of their thoughts and decisions is the
> outcome of complex and unobservable mental processes,
> the nature of which researchers in both these areas of
> inquiry are trying to elucidate."
>
In other words, if you want to build systems which are capable of behaving
*intelligently*, don't try to model psychological processes. Look instead
to what has been achieved to date in the sciences of logic and statistics.
If you want to *measure* how intelligent people can behave, use normative
tests like IQ or scholastic achievement. IF you want to *select* the best
people for particular tasks, *define* what behaviours those tasks require,
and assess your candidates for such skills.
AI, in other words, basically *is* the accumulating (objective, world 3,
extensional - knowledge base of) logic, statistics, physics, chemistry
etc etc. ie science itself.
We already depend on "machines" to help us predict the world more accurately,
ie as scientific/technological aids. The tools of AI are already with us,
and have been since we first turned to the extensional stance...
To *romantic* notion of AI, is, (again IMHO) just that process taken to its
extreme (which will never be actualized, just as the pursuit of scientific
truth can never be finally actualized).
Slightly deflationary....eh?
--
David Longley
Neil Rickert
>In article <828913...@longley.demon.co.uk>
> Da...@longley.demon.co.uk "David Longley" writes:
>> "In sum, the major psychological discovery about both
>> reasoning and decision making is that normative theory
>> and psychological facts pass each other by. People are
>> not intuitive logicians, intuitive statisticians, or
>> intuitive rational decision theorists. Instead, the
>> precise character of their thoughts and decisions is the
>> outcome of complex and unobservable mental processes,
>> the nature of which researchers in both these areas of
>> inquiry are trying to elucidate."
>In other words, if you want to build systems which are capable of behaving
>*intelligently*, don't try to model psychological processes. Look instead
>to what has been achieved to date in the sciences of logic and statistics.
No, no, no! It does not say that at all. On the contrary, it says
that if you want to build a system that behaves intelligently, it
will do no good to base it on so-called normative models.
Keep in mind that the word "intelligent" gains it meaning from what
people do, not from what computers do. We talk about *artificial*
intelligence because we recognize that limitation.
>If you want to *measure* how intelligent people can behave, use normative
>tests like IQ or scholastic achievement.
But there is no normative model which tell one whether an IQ test is
a measure of intelligent behavior. We judge it so, but that is a
matter of human judgement, not of some normative model.
> IF you want to *select* the best
>people for particular tasks, *define* what behaviours those tasks require,
>and assess your candidates for such skills.
There is no normative model which would define what behaviours the
tasks require. That is exactly the problem. People sometime do very
complex tasks, but quite commonly they are unable to define what they
do precisely enough for us to program it into a computer.
>AI, in other words, basically *is* the accumulating (objective, world 3,
>extensional - knowledge base of) logic, statistics, physics, chemistry
>etc etc. ie science itself.
But there is no normative model which would decide whether a
particular item of knowledge is objective. Indeed, there is no
normative model which would tell whether a particular item of
knowledge is an item of knowledge. Normative models all sit on top
of the human judgement of folk psychology.
>We already depend on "machines" to help us predict the world more accurately,
>ie as scientific/technological aids.
Right. Exactly so. These machines are mere tools. They are
extensions of our own human judgement. Without the humans to judge
them and interpret them, they would be worthless. Similarly all
normative models would be useless except for the human judgement
which can interpret them and determine when and whether to apply
them.
>To *romantic* notion of AI, is, (again IMHO) just that process taken to its
>extreme (which will never be actualized, just as the pursuit of scientific
>truth can never be finally actualized).
It will never be actualized until AI tackles the problem of finding a
basis for human judgement, on which current AI depends.
>Slightly deflationary....eh?
Highly deflationary -- to your behaviorism.
Ken Ewell
>In article <4k45vh$d...@huron.eel.ufl.edu>
> mit...@readware.com "Ken Ewell" writes:
>> It comes down to this:
>>
>> The kind of abstruse psychology of understanding doggedly propounded
>> by David Longely can never hope to gain any influence over the
>> behaivor it purportedly hopes to define. The feelings of one's heart
>> readily serve to dissipate all of its conclusions. And while I am
>> probably paraphrasing, while consciously suppressing the urge to quote
>> some famous personage whose opinions might be held more vauable than
>> my own, I am in no need of such a defense against the weak and
>> unproductive arguments and objections that David presents.
>The following is extracted from the introductory chapter to a
>relatively recent collection of papers in the area of reasoning
>and decision making. The reference is:
> "Reasoning and Decision Making"
> Edited by P.N. Johnson-Laird and Eldar Shafir
> A "Cognition" Special Issue (1993)
<snip>
> "In sum, the major psychological discovery about both
> reasoning and decision making is that normative theory
> and psychological facts pass each other by.
They pass me by too; well, I suppose this is much like any common
sense passes David Longley by.
> People are
> not intuitive logicians, intuitive statisticians, or
> intuitive rational decision theorists.
Certainly not in a professional sense, but otherwise I disagree
largely with this premise. Most people think logically, rationally,
and they decide intuitively. To deny this is to deny the words that
you use and the propositions and expressions you form.
> Instead, the
> precise character of their thoughts and decisions is the
> outcome of complex and unobservable mental processes,
> the nature of which researchers in both these areas of
> inquiry are trying to elucidate."
No doubt that researchers in both areas of inquiry are trying to
elucidate this; however, I disagree that it is unobservable. Speech
is an observable mental process. The question is: What is it that
underlies this?
<snip>
I would reject both views equally.
> The proper study of the mind is
> instead brain, nerve, and synapse (e.g., Churchland,
> 1984; Stich, 1983).
This is a more proper view and is no need of either intensional or
extensional terminology.
> At the heart of these critiques
> seems to lie a common philosophical skepticism about
> 'intentional objects', that is, mental representations
> that have content and that are about something.
All mental representations that manifest in human language have
content, regardless of whether they are labled intensional or
extensional.
> Students of reasoning and decision making do not
> generally regard assumptions about beliefs, desires, and
> values with total skepticism, but they are suspicious of
> one component of folk psychology; the myth of perfect
> awareness.
Tell me, in your words please, what is the myth of perfect
awareness.
> Unlike cognitive and social psychologists,
> most people believe that their conscious feelings and
> judgments control their actions. The claim is a legacy
> of the Cartesian identification of the mind with
> consciousness. Nothing is easier according to this
> principle than to know the contents of your mind:
> introspection will deliver them to you as part of your
> immediate experience.
No doubt.
> But to what extent can you be
> aware of the causes of your behavior?
I fail to see what the causes of one's behavior has to do with
effective reasoning and decision making.
> There is probably
> no way to answer this question for any particular
> action.
No doubt.
> That is the problem that historians face. But
> the psychological study of reasoning and decision making
> has answered the question for replicable classes of
> action. individuals are often not aware of how they
> reason, having at best only glimpses of the process.
> They are aware of the results, not the mechanism. What
> they say about their reasoning does not tally with its
> real nature (e.g., Wason & Evans, 1975). Likewise, as
> Nisbett and RosS (1980) have argued, people often are
> not aware of the real basis of their decisions.
Also, no doubt; this being the reason that you cannot reach the basis
of reasoning and decision making through human behavior.
<snip...>
> It is true, nonetheless, that introspection
> is not a direct route to understanding mental processes,
> and, as far as we know, there is no direct route. That
> is why psychologists studying reasoning and decision
> making are committed to experimental investigations
> rather than to introspection and a priori analysis (also
> known as 'indoor ornithology').
This expalins the current confused state of psychological analysis and
behavior science.
<snip>
> Perhaps none of them is relevant to human competence,
> because an assertion, such as:
> It is raining and possibly it is not raining
>
> is not a self-contradiction in any of these logics, as
> it seems to be in everyday language, which distinguishes
> between this assertion and the following "counter-
> factual one:
> It is raining, but it might not have been raining.
>
> Second, logic gives no account of which valid conclusion
> to draw. From any set of Premises there are always
> infinitely many conclusions that follow validly, that is
> they must be true given that the premises are true. Most
> of these conclusions are trivial, and it would hardly be
> rational to infer them. For example, given the following
> premises:
> If it is raining, then there is no need to water the plants.
>
> It is raining.
>
> a sensible, rational, conclusion is:
> There is no need to water the plants.
>
> But any of the following conclusions are valid too:
> It is raining or it is not raining.
>
> It is raining or it is snowing.
>
> It is raining or cats and dogs are falling out of the sky.
>
> and so on.
All of these are very good examples of why the mental complex of
reasoning and decision making cannot be expressed in these terms.
> Logic alone cannot determine which of the
> infinitely many valid conclusions are sensible to draw.
The reason being that you are attempting to apply logic to the outward
and manifest terminlogy rather than to the underlying mechanisim and
its constituents.
> More recently, Henle (1962) has
> argued that apparent mistakes in reasoning do not impugn
> the underlying mechanism:
Well, this is presumably true, but not for the rational that followed
in the orignal post. (So it have been snipped.)
> In the case of decision making, the classical
> normative account is expected utilitY theory (EUT),
> wherein the value of an alternative consists of the sum
> of the utilities of its outcomes, each weighted by its
> probability.
I cannot fathom what probability has to do with reasoning which I
recognize as the basis or motive for an action, decision, feeling, or
belief. I do not nomally reason on what is probable, I reason on what
is recognizably real, existent, and manifest, and perhaps, possible.
> Certain assumptions of rational choice have had
> more normative appeal than others.
Oh! OK, you are not talking about reason, you are talking about choice
and whether that is rational or not.
> People are not intuitive logicians,
I disagree. People are intuitively logical.
> intuitive
> statisticians,
In the sense that everyone knows "you win some and you lose some,"
people are intuitive statisticians. Otherwise statistics has little
to do with it.
> or intuitive rational decision theorists.
A person can rise on a bright sunny morning and remark that the sun is
out today. IMO, this makes that person a rational decision theorist.
OTOH, if in seeing the sun is out, they express that it is not, they
would be an irrational decision theorist.
> Instead, the precise character of their thoughts and
> decisions is the outcome of complex and unobservable
> mental processes, the nature of which researchers in
> both these areas of inquiry are trying to elucidate.
On this we can agree, allthough I do not imagine it to be complex or
unobservable. Complexity only arises in the form of explanation and
it is completely observable; otherwise a child would never learn it.
> Some lessons from the study of reasoning and decision
> making
> A significant lesson from the study of reasoning
> is that theories of mental processes should be
> computable, that is, sufficiently explicit that, in
> principle. they could be modeled in computer programs.
Of this there is no doubt. We have a achieved a computational model
of the mental processes underlying human language. And in order that
I may put a halt to all your harping about "intensional" and
"extensional" language, I will show you the thinking and the language
our model is based on.
BEWARE DAVID - Orignial Thought Follows:
We believe that the confusion surrounding cognition has been prolonged
by the lack of a theory of semantics. Such a theory should have the
power to explain the relation between language and the real world to
which it refers. What is called "semantics" in lingusitics,
psychology, and the cognitive sciences, is nothing more than "mental"
postulates, or psudeosemantics, that masquerade as semantics.
In practice, a message in natural language is viewed largely as being
randomly encoded by socially evolving human brains. Written text is
seen as random sequences of random letter combinations that relate to
randomly defined concepts only by table lookup (by dictionaries), and
relate to each other according to randomly defined mental structures.
The relation between a given alphabet and the concepts expressed
through its usage is considered to be arbitrary or unattainably
complex. Since scientists tend to regard any apparently unpredictable
behavior of a natural event as a stochastic process, cognitive and
information science is, more or less, a statistical practice hoping to
reduce unpredictability. However, statistical models of such
processes may or may not reduce that unpredictability. This is why
any biased (non-random) behavior of an event motivates to a more
thorough study of that event hoping to find a mathematical model that
is more concrete than a statistical one.
We have introduced a theory of language semantics and information that
relates message structure to message content. The model connects
expression with thought and helps to explain the cognitive processes
of categorization and classification in the conscious structuring and
interpretation of a message; and it also shows how a natural language
message signifies physical processes and states in a given situation.
There is however, a natural constraint of explanation that must be
stated: Basic level concepts are ephemeral; they are not used
representationally although they are highly correlated with the
physical environment in which they are used. In our model, each
alphabetic (or vocal) element in a given alphabet relates, abstractly,
to a cluster of concepts (signifiers of physical processes and states
(i.e., the content)) from which humans reason, and select, to form
expressions and communicate information. When we choose a term to
express or describe how a structural element of a message relates to
message content, that term (word) will itself comprise more than one
alphabetic element, and hence, will never express exactly what we
want. We call this the notation paradox. Therefore, the terms we
choose to name elementary or basic level concepts will all suffer from
this paradox. With this in mind, we use terms to approximate basic
level concepts and to circumscribe the significant issues selected
from the available cluster of concepts. Nothing intensional or
extensional intended.
Another natural constraint in presenting results is the issue of the
incompleteness or partiality of any relation found between aspects of
message structure and aspects of message content in a natural language
message. There is no "absolute certainty" here. This incompleteness
exemplifies a crucial difference in nature between the contents of
natural language messages and the contents of say, a numerical
message. This difference, this incompleteness of representation, is
responsible for the expansiveness of human thought. There seem to be
an infinite number of ways to interpret a message within the range of
a cluster of concepts that can signify that message. It seems as
though in our usage of messages to communicate and understand our
experience, we choose any particular combination that comes to mind
according to its suitability to the situation and the physical
environment. However, whatever the particular combination used, it is
organized from the basic level concepts themselves. That is; while
the central coordinate of a single letter or vocal is fixed and
immutable, our capacity to combine two or more of them in various and
subtle ways and use them the way we do, is unconstrained. It only
seems as though our ability to use them freely is hampered, if not
outright constrained, by social and academic conventions and by
geographical, cultural, and politcial norms; and of course, the
intensional and extensional idioms.
To formulate theorems for mapping message structure to message content
we first had to formulate some high-level principles to govern natural
language messages. Since we are used to looking at natural languages
as stochastic processes determined by the evolving social conventions
in human minds, we first had to find other ways to think about human
languages. We began to think of language much like a physicist thinks
of a physical field. This was perhaps the most difficult aspect of
this work as our thought patterns become hardened somehow and it
requires a great discipline and attention to change them. After
several years of research, thinking, and applying energy to changing
our thought patterns, the following principles emerged:
Origin of Language.
People do not invent meaningful words, they either learn them from
others, or discover new words in their minds, or combine (parts of)
old words into new words.
Spelling is a natural recognitive process and so is the transition
from spoken language (sounds) to written language (letters).
Non-alphabetic languages have an implicit spelling of some form.
All languages stem from one language: we can call this a "Mother
Language." The mother language has thirty-two sounds, which map
one-to-one to thirty-two symbols (letters) of the mother alphabet.
Symmetry of the Mother Alphabet.
The mother alphabet is organized in two dimensions of concepts: We can
call them archcategories and archorientations. Each symbol of the
mother alphabet stands for an archcategory and an archorientation.
There are four archorientations and eight archcategories.
The four archorientations define a super-symmetry: two for one-sided
duality and two for interface duality that complement the first two.
The eight archcategories comprise all combinations of three elementary
archcategories, including the null archcategory. The three elementary
archcategories can be circumscribed as the abstract concept spaces of
Identity, Essence, and Order.
None-the-less, the mother alphabet represents a complete and
consistent symmetry system.
Archetypes of Thought, Reason, and Expression.
The words of the mother language have mostly triliteral stems. The
words of the mother language were derived from these stems according
to certain forms that we will call archforms.
We called these principles "Letter Semantics" and found that they open
new ways of thinking about human language messages and the things they
express.
Before we continue we should first explain that in the development of
human languages, it is given that sounds change, letters and even
alphabets change, words change, word usage changes, and even texts
change. Because of this, most linguists now believe that the
structure of sounds and letters in words are arbitrary and have no
relation to meaning.
To be sure, the rules of language change are complex and compounded
over time. Yet, that we are taught language is also clear. We know
of no one alive nor is there any concrete proof that anyone in the
history of the world just blurted out a language, without being taught
to speak, to read and/or to write that language. The assumption that
there was a mother language and that that language was taught to the
people of the time is just as valid an assumption as any other
assumptions underlying the origin of language. It is not necessary,
to the theory's usefulness and ability to explain, to speculate from
whom or where the mother language derived.
If we consider the words of our modern languages, we can easily see
that they are mostly colloquial forms of older languages. We often
recognize, consciously or subconsciously, the archstems, the
archwords, and the archforms of the mother language. Studies show
conclusively that High School students that study vocabulary and the
origins of derived forms of vocabulary do better (all around) than
those who don't. This is because this recognition guides our thinking
and feeling. Archstems and archforms are the archetypes of human
thought and feeling.
Mapping Alphabets into Abstract Domains
While studying word patterns in various languages, my associate,
Dr. Tom Adi, noticed certain regularities in the relations between
short word patterns and the abstract issues people associate with
them. While studying classical Arabic these patterns became clearer
due to certain features of the Arabic language well known to most
linguists, i.e., (Ancient) Arabic has a one-to-one correspondence
between phonemes and letters.
A more thorough study of Arabic led him to set up a model of natural
language according to which every alphabet is mapped by a
characteristic function (F) into an abstract domain common to all
languages that he called the domain of BINARILY ACTIVE CATEGORIES. It
turned out that F is one-to-one and onto (a bijection) in Arabic.
This elegant symmetry scheme enabled the determination of F for twelve
other languages by analogy, although none of the other languages
studied had a bijective F. Moreover, many languages required that
certain digraphs and trigrams be treated as single alphabetic elements
in the characteristic mapping function.
A report of this derivation procedure would not only require volumes
of information in the way of examples, the above mentioned notation
paradox would lead to controversy. Suffice it to say, Dr. Adi derived
the theorems and lemmas stated below by applying the following
inductive procedure:
1) Determine the relation between message content and single letters
or vocals by analyzing the usage of isolated letters or vocals in
short words e.g. prepositions, prefixes, suffixes, etc.
2) Extend and verify results for digraphs, trigrams, etc.
***As you can see David: No extenstional or intensional terms here.
A subsequent analysis of the outcome of this procedure led to the
following lemmas:
Lemma 1
Every alphabetical element (letter or vocal) relates abstractly to
parts of message content associated with that alphabetical element.
Lemma 2
There are two aspects to every such relation: a category aspect and a
procedural aspect. A procedural element has three variants: idle,
dynamic, and stationary. Procedural aspects are always dual, i.e.,
composed of two procedural elements.
Lemma 3
The structure of digraphs, trigrams, etc., relates to partial abstract
aspects of structure given by the message content associated with that
digraph, trigram, etc.
Lemma 4
Every alphabetical element has a counterpart of the same category but
with the opposite procedural pair, and every such alphabetical pair
has a complementary pair of the same category.
These lemmas sum up to a scheme of symmetry on the complete Arabic
alphabet from which the mapping function F was derived. This function
assigns every alphabetical element (every letter and every vocal) to a
pair of abstract elements (a category and a procedural pair) that
partially signify the message content of that alphabetical element. F
can be stated as theorem 1:
THEOREM 1
Every natural alphabet A consisting of the elements a1, a2, ... has a
characteristic mapping function F
F: A---> CO*A²
This function maps the alphabetical elements of A into the product set
of two sets of abstract elements CO* and A² signifying all possible
elements of the real world. CO* and A² can be defined as follows:
Let c1 be the category of all abstract types of elements, c2 be the
category of all abstract types of domains, and c3 be the category of
all abstract types of orders. We call C0 = {c1, c2, c3} the set of
elementary abstract categories. The power set C0* contains all
possible abstract categories:
C0* ={{}, {c1}, {c2}, {c3}, {c1,c2}, {c1,c3}, {c2,c3}, {c1,c2,c3}}
whereby {} is the null category.
Let p be the elementary type of all procedures and n be the opposite
of p. P is the set of all ordered pairs of elementary procedures.
We may also refer to p as positive activity and n as negative activity
in order to simplify things, but the abstract concepts are more
general than that. We call A² (a set of ordered pairs) the set of
binary activators:
A² = { (p, n), (n, p), (p, p), (n, n) }
whereby the order of a pair implies having two distinct sides of
activity, or polarity, in the most abstract sense (subject/object,
here/there, primary/secondary, etc.)
The multiplication operator x in the expression C0* x A² implies that
categories are activated by binary activators in three modes:
a) p0 and n0 denote the idle mode
(null activity).
b) pd and nd denote the dynamic mode
(category as procedure).
c) ps and ns denote the stationary mode
(category as state).
This function can be represented in a matrix filled with alphabetical
elements. We call this the Letter Semantic matrix or the Binary
Activation matrix. The matrix for the Arabic language is in the table
below (using sound approximations:)
F: A-->CO* X P Binary Activator/Procedureal Pair
Category (Orientation)
(p,n) (n,p) (p,p) (n,n)
{} vocal i vocal a vocal u sukoon
{c1} aleph yaa' waaw haa'
{c2} meem faa' daal thaal
{c3} 'ain noon qaaf ghain
{c1,c2} raa' laam baa' taa'
{c1, c3} seen zaay ssaad thaa'
{c2, c3} kaaf ddaad ttaa' khaa'
{c1, c2, c3} hhaa' sheen jeem zzaa'
As stated earlier, the function can be extended to the alphabets of
other languages even if the languages do not have enough alphabetical
elements to fill the matrix completely. In many cases, two
alphabetical elements such as sh or th in the Roman alphabet can fill
a matrix cell. Also, in English for example, the categories of
certain letters are determined by whether they are preceded or
followed by other letters (usually vowels.) Nevertheless, this matrix
explicitly connects message structure to content (to the environment)
and to human thought. To understand how categories and procedures
signify contents and drive our thinking and feeling, we have prepared
another paper entitled Archetypes of Thought and Feeling. (Anyone
wanting this paper can notify me by email.)
Now that we have described how a language relates to the real world,
we can describe how the content of any natural language message can be
mapped from its structure.
Mapping Message Content from Message Structure
Given a word W = w1...wn on an alphabet A (wi _ A) with the
characteristic function F: A--> C0* x A² as defined above, the compact
category vector (word component tuple) CV of W can be simply defined
as the sequence of the non-null categories of its elements wi:
CV(W) = (ci | F(wi) = (ci, ai), i = 1...n, ci =/= {}).
Similarly, the compact activator vector (procedural-pair component
tuple) AV of W is defined as the sequence of its the binary activators
of those elements wi that do not have a null category:
AV(W) = (ai | F(wi) = (ci, ai), i = 1...n, ci =/= {}).
The transcending duality of our model led us to suggest (and
successfully test) the principle that the association between two
words is based on pairwise comparisons between the elements of their
compact vectors.
Let us first define some measures. The cardinality L of a category is
defined as the number of elementary categories contained in it. We
have:
L({}) = 0
L({c1}) = L({c2}) = L({c3}) = 1
L({c1, c2}) = L({c1, c3}) = L({c2, c3}) = 2
L({c1, c2, c3}) = 3
We assign as a unit for the cardinality the "unit of abstractness".
e.g. L({c1}) = 1 unit of abstractness. The cardinality of a category
pair is defined as the sum of the cardinalities of its component
categories.
THEOREM 2
Every word W contains zero or more special alphabetical elements r1,
r2,... which we will call relators. Relators play a structural role
in that they operate according to their procedural pairs on the rest
of the elements in the word component tuple. Relators are identified
in a word by using an ordered tuple of special non-null category
alphabetical elements H which we call the relator precedence sequence.
R(W) = F1(W, H)
whereby R(W) is the tuple of relators in W in their order of
occurrence.
For example, in the English language H= (r, l, w, b, t, d) As an
example we have:
R(word) = (r) (r precedes w)
R(world) = (r, l) (we take both r and l: they are a symmetry pair)
R(zip) = () (no relator at all)
Some words have more than one relator. The number of relators in the
relator tuple of a given word is called the relator cardinality of
that word.
THEOREM 3
The structure of a word T(W) is a vector function F2 of the word
relator tuple (R(W) and the word rest tuple W - R(W) signifying the
word after extracting its relator tuple.
T(W) = F2(R(W), W - R(W))
F2 is a vector because procedural pairs (both in the relator tuple and
in the word rest tuple) can have different variants.
LEMMA 5
Each procedural pair has two singular (i.e. one-sided) dynamic
variants.
The binary activation of categories can be unilaterally dynamic as
shown in the following table:
Singular Dynamic Variants of procedural Pairs
Procedural Pair Singular Dynamic Variants
(p, n) (pd, n0) recursive procedure
(p0, nd) anti-procursive procedure
(n, p) (nd, p0) anti-recursive procedure
(n0, pd) procursive procedure
(p, p) (pd, p0) positively convergent procedure
(p0, pd) positively divergent procedure
(n, n) (nd, n0) negatively convergent procedure
(n0, nd) negatively divergent procedure
LEMMA 6
Procedural pairs that do not belong to relators can each have two
singular stationary variants as shown in the following table:
Singular Stationary Variants of Procedural Pairs
Procedural Pair Singular Stationary Variants
(p, n) (ps, n0) subjective state
(p0, ns) non-objective state
(n, p) (ns, p0) non-subjective state
(n0, ps) objective state
(p, p) (ps, p0) positive state
(p0, ps) positive interface
(n, n) (ns, n0) negative state
(n0, ns) negative interface
It must be pointed out that we are here viewing a stationary procedure
as a state, which does not contradict the physical concept of a state.
LEMMA 7
A procedural pair can have more than one singular variant
simultaneously.
The two singular dynamic variants of a procedural pair can thus be
combined to form hybrid dual dynamic variants. Hybrid dual variants
are formed by combining dynamic and stationary variants.
Bilaterally dynamic and bilaterally stationary activation can be
defined and interpreted in a similar fashion. The model also allows
defining other types of binary activation.
Now that we have both a mapping and some measures we can compute
various aspects of information content.
THEOREM 4
The quantity of information Q in a word W is a vector function of its
structure T(W):
Q(W) = F3(T(W)).
F3 is a vector because F2 is one, i.e. F3 can select structural
functions (components) from F2. The basic idea in quantifying
structural features is that the amount of information varies with the
cardinality of the categories involved as well as relator cardinality.
This should not be perceived as a limitation as we can also give
weight to the position of the relator in a word, to the variant
cardinality of a procedural pair (1 = singular variant, 2 = dual
variant...), etc. (Note: Weights are not based on probabilities.)
We define the cardinality of any binary activator to be equal to one
half unit of abstraction, so that by extending the concept of
cardinality of a category pair to activators, a pair of binary
activators has unity cardinality.
Although, these measures are more accurate and precise in linking
content to structure when the original root form of the word is used,
the measure can be used (imprecisely) to compute information quantity
on a triplet of letters extracted from the orthography of any word.
Here is a simplified way of computing Q(W) for any English language
word.
ALGORITHM 1
1) Take a message word (English).
2) If the word has a prefix, reduce the prefix to the first letter.
3) Truncate endings, e.g., plural -s, -ed, -tion, and -ing, etc..
4) Take the first three alphabetical elements of a non-null category
in the word (or less if there are less than three letters), say, the
alphabetical elements e1, e2, and e3 whereby e2 and e3 can be absent.
5) A good simplified measure for the quantity of information in this
word is then:
Q(W) = Q(e1 e2 e3) = L(C(e1))+L(C(e2))+L(C(e3))+L(e1 e2 e3)
whereby L is the number of alphabetical elements taken.
EXAMPLE:
Q(preserve) =
Q(p s r) =L( C (p) ) + L( C (s) ) + L( C (r) ) + L (p s r)
=L( {c2}) + L({c1,c3}) + L({c1,c2}) + 3
= 1 + 2 + 2 +
3
= 8 (units of abstractness)
F3 can be used to develop a non-probabilistic measure of entropy which
is not dependent upon letter statistics. For example, algorithm 1
above, can be used to compute Q for the words of a certain dictionary
and then we can take their average as a measure of entropy.
THEOREM 5
The information shared between two words W1 and W2, on the alphabets
A1 and A2 respectively, is a vector function of their structures:
S(W1, W2) = F4( T1 (W1), T2(W2) ).
This means that on a single alphabet, syntax, the (word to word
structure) is based upon morphology (internal word structure). One
statistical consequence of this theorem is auto-correlation in the
stochastic processes modeling a language source.
The following algorithm computes a simple form of S(W1, W2) for two
words in English.
ALGORITHM 2
1) Use algorithm 1 to reduce two English language words W1 and W2.
Assume you get W1-->(e1 e2 e3) and W2 -->(d1 d2 d3).
2) S(W1, W2) = 0
3) IF C(e1) = C(d1) AND C(e2) = C(d2) THEN
S(W1, W2) = L( C (e1) ) + L (C (e2) )
4) IF C(e2) = C(d2) AND C(e3) = C(d3) THEN
S(W1, W2) = S(W1, W2) + L( C (e2) ) + L (C (e3) )
5) IF P(e1) = P(d1) AND P(e2) = P(d2) THEN
S(W1, W2) = S(W1, W2) + 1
6) IF P(e2) = P(d2) AND P(e3) = P(d3) THEN
S(W1, W2) = S(W1, W2) + 1
THEOREM 6
Given a message G on the alphabet A, i.e., G = (g1, ..., gm), g1 to gm
are words on A.
The quantity of information in the message G is a vector function of
the quantities of information of its word components as well as any
shared information between those words.
Q(G) = F5(Q(g1), ..., (Q(gm), S(g1, g2), ... , S(gm-1, gm)).
Now: How does this help to explain how we reason in terms that are
acceptable and understandable to most people? It does not. It is
useful only for those who are logically or mathematically inclined,
but that leaves out the vast expanse of humanity. This reason is why
I started this topic. I am looking for a real-world way of explaining
all of the above; which I deem as (at least a part of) the basis of
our common sense.
It is true that:
> Indeed, many researchers have implemented their theories
> in computer programs............. The practice helps to
> ensure that theorists are not taking too much for
> granted and that their theories are not vague,
> incoherent, or, like mystical insights, only properly
> understood by their proponents. The effort to develop a
> computable theory concentrates the theorist i mind on
> the nature of underlying mental processes; it alerts the
> theorist to the design of mental architecture (Newell,
> 1990) and to the puzzle of how intellectual strategies
> might develop. Similarly. since programs should not be
> equated with theories. there can be a dialectical
> improvement in the theories: what a program does is not
> as important as the effects its development may have on
> the theorist's thinking
By the way: If anyone is interested, they can request a copy of a
software program that implements the above listed theories (and more)
into a computational system of information retrieval that is capable
of relating words by the concepts they represent regardless of whether
or not the words are expressed in the same language. You can get the
software free, but if you are going to use it, you should register it.
To get the software, go to:
> A significant lesson from the study of decision
> making is the need for experiments to examine realistic
> problems. It is of limited interest to investigate text-
> book examples if they are so artificial and so remote
> from the exigencies of daily life that subjects are
> likely to adopt strategies that are otherwise alien to
> their everyday thinking.
David, did you include the passage above for yourself? If not, you
should take note.
> The result will be a burgeoning
> literature that is largely irrelevant to the real nature
> of thinking.
Like the burgeoning and incessent quotations from the literature amply
supplied by David Longely.
> In contrast, students of decision making
> have investigated among others, the decisions of doctors
> about treatments, of gamblers in casinos, and of
> customers in shopping malls. Similarly, many of the
> laboratory studies, while hypothetical in nature, show
> an enhanced sensitivity to the verisimilitude of their
> tasks.
The key that the above paragraph turns on is "while hypothetical in
nature."
<..snip>
> The development of effective prescriptions to
> overcome such difficulties calls for further thinking
> and analysis on the part of both lay people and
> researchers."
> Philip Johnson-Laird, and Eldar Shafir (1993)
> The Interaction Between Reasoning and Decision Making: An Introduction
I could not agree more. You should heed what you post David.
Ken Ewell
David Longley
> In <828999...@longley.demon.co.uk> David Longley <Da...@longley.demon.co.uk>
> writes:
> >In article <828913...@longley.demon.co.uk>
> > Da...@longley.demon.co.uk "David Longley" writes:
>
> >> "In sum, the major psychological discovery about both
> >> reasoning and decision making is that normative theory
> >> and psychological facts pass each other by. People are
> >> not intuitive logicians, intuitive statisticians, or
> >> intuitive rational decision theorists. Instead, the
> >> precise character of their thoughts and decisions is the
> >> outcome of complex and unobservable mental processes,
> >> the nature of which researchers in both these areas of
> >> inquiry are trying to elucidate."
>
> >In other words, if you want to build systems which are capable of behaving
> >*intelligently*, don't try to model psychological processes. Look instead
> >to what has been achieved to date in the sciences of logic and statistics.
>
> No, no, no! It does not say that at all. On the contrary, it says
> that if you want to build a system that behaves intelligently, it
> will do no good to base it on so-called normative models.
>
E-R-A-F-O !
> Keep in mind that the word "intelligent" gains it meaning from what
> people do, not from what computers do. We talk about *artificial*
> intelligence because we recognize that limitation.
>
Words get their *meaning* (intension) from the way they are used. So what?
I have absolutely no interest in your notion of intelligence, except to try
to work around its obvious limitations (its range of applicability).
> >If you want to *measure* how intelligent people can behave, use normative
> >tests like IQ or scholastic achievement.
>
> But there is no normative model which tell one whether an IQ test is
> a measure of intelligent behavior. We judge it so, but that is a
> matter of human judgement, not of some normative model.
>
Don't be so &*&*& - if you want to understand what IQ is all about, read
Cronback or Anatasi on psychological testing.
*All* you keep revealing here, is your very limited grasp of psychology...
> > IF you want to *select* the best
> >people for particular tasks, *define* what behaviours those tasks require,
> >and assess your candidates for such skills.
>
> There is no normative model which would define what behaviours the
> tasks require. That is exactly the problem. People sometime do very
> complex tasks, but quite commonly they are unable to define what they
> do precisely enough for us to program it into a computer.
>
** E-R-A-F-O **
> >AI, in other words, basically *is* the accumulating (objective, world 3,
> >extensional - knowledge base of) logic, statistics, physics, chemistry
> >etc etc. ie science itself.
>
> But there is no normative model which would decide whether a
> particular item of knowledge is objective. Indeed, there is no
> normative model which would tell whether a particular item of
> knowledge is an item of knowledge. Normative models all sit on top
> of the human judgement of folk psychology.
>
** E-R-A-F-O **
> >We already depend on "machines" to help us predict the world more accurately,
> >ie as scientific/technological aids.
>
> Right. Exactly so. These machines are mere tools. They are
> extensions of our own human judgement. Without the humans to judge
> them and interpret them, they would be worthless. Similarly all
> normative models would be useless except for the human judgement
> which can interpret them and determine when and whether to apply
> them.
>
> >T[he] *romantic* notion of AI, is, (again IMHO) just that process taken
> >to its extreme (which will never be actualized, just as the pursuit of
> >scientific truth can never be finally actualized).
>
> It will never be actualized until AI tackles the problem of finding a
> basis for human judgement, on which current AI depends.
>
> >Slightly deflationary....eh?
>
> Highly deflationary -- to your behaviorism.
>
You are *erafoically* chasing moonbeams Rickert, and you clearly don't have
the sense to look right here where the sun shines! ( I could have put it
more crudely, but what's the point - you evidently can't see the truth when
it's right in front of you).
--
David Longley
David Longley
mit...@readware.com "Ken Ewell" writes:
Let me give you some well meant advice....
Go away and study this subject properly before sharing your views on it so
publically.
Like Rickert, you want your personal beliefs vindicated, and that just isn't
likely to happen unless your beliefs have already been learned through
scientific study/research.
--
David Longley
Neil Rickert
>In article <4kc4cu$o...@mp.cs.niu.edu> ric...@cs.niu.edu "Neil Rickert" writes:
>> >> "In sum, the major psychological discovery about both
>> >> reasoning and decision making is that normative theory
>> >> and psychological facts pass each other by. People are
>> >> not intuitive logicians, intuitive statisticians, or
>> >> intuitive rational decision theorists. Instead, the
>> >> precise character of their thoughts and decisions is the
>> >> outcome of complex and unobservable mental processes,
>> >> the nature of which researchers in both these areas of
>> >> inquiry are trying to elucidate."
>> >In other words, if you want to build systems which are capable of behaving
>> >*intelligently*, don't try to model psychological processes. Look instead
>> >to what has been achieved to date in the sciences of logic and statistics.
>> No, no, no! It does not say that at all. On the contrary, it says
>> that if you want to build a system that behaves intelligently, it
>> will do no good to base it on so-called normative models.
> E-R-A-F-O !
Am I supposed to know what "E-R-A-F-O" signifies?
>> Keep in mind that the word "intelligent" gains it meaning from what
>> people do, not from what computers do. We talk about *artificial*
>> intelligence because we recognize that limitation.
>Words get their *meaning* (intension) from the way they are used. So what?
>I have absolutely no interest in your notion of intelligence, except to try
>to work around its obvious limitations (its range of applicability).
In that case you should be studying the behavior, psychology and
intelligence of silocon computers. I don't expect such a study to
help you much with prison inmates, however.
>> >If you want to *measure* how intelligent people can behave, use normative
>> >tests like IQ or scholastic achievement.
>> But there is no normative model which tell one whether an IQ test is
>> a measure of intelligent behavior. We judge it so, but that is a
>> matter of human judgement, not of some normative model.
>Don't be so &*&*& - if you want to understand what IQ is all about, read
>Cronback or Anatasi on psychological testing.
>*All* you keep revealing here, is your very limited grasp of psychology...
By your own claim, normative models are not psychological. Therefore
I do not need to know anything at all about psychology to be able to
determine whether there are normative standards as to whether an IQ
test is satisfactory. Since, on your claim, such a normative
standard is based on pure logic, I need only explore the limitations
of logic. I have done so. The limitations are such that there can
be no purely logical standard to determine with an IQ test actually
measures human intelligence.
>> >Slightly deflationary....eh?
>> Highly deflationary -- to your behaviorism.
>You are *erafoically* chasing moonbeams Rickert, and you clearly don't have
>the sense to look right here where the sun shines!
On the contrary, my eyes are wide open, and I understand exactly what
I am talking about. That is why I am not making damn fool statements
about replacing human intelligence by an a priori normative (so
called) standard, presumably dictated from the gods on high, and
never established as valid by experimental data.
Neil Rickert
>Go away and study this subject properly before sharing your views on it so
>publically.
>Like Rickert, you want your personal beliefs vindicated, and that just isn't
>likely to happen unless your beliefs have already been learned through
>scientific study/research.
I'm not impressed with your insults. I don't expect to see my
personal beliefs vindicated in a usenet newsgroup. What I care
about, is that some idiot named Longley is propogating absurd
anti-scientific myths in the pretense that they are science.
David Longley
Da...@longley.demon.co.uk "David Longley" writes:
Alternatively..
>
> Don't be so !$*% - if you want to understand what IQ is all about, read
> Cronbach or Anastasi on psychological testing.
It's a technical term which like "arousal" has a technical meaning which
comes with its technical usage......You can't appropriate it for you own
personal usage and still expect to be reliably understood.
--
David Longley
David Longley
>
> In that case you should be studying the behavior, psychology and
> intelligence of silocon computers. I don't expect such a study to
> help you much with prison inmates, however.
Yu don't understand the difference between normative and descriptive. That
does not surprise me. You need to have studied the disciplines involved to
appreciate the full significance of the difference.
>
> >*All* you keep revealing here, is your very limited grasp of psychology...
>
> By your own claim, normative models are not psychological. Therefore
> I do not need to know anything at all about psychology to be able to
> determine whether there are normative standards as to whether an IQ
> test is satisfactory. Since, on your claim, such a normative
> standard is based on pure logic, I need only explore the limitations
> of logic. I have done so. The limitations are such that there can
> be no purely logical standard to determine with an IQ test actually
> measures human intelligence.
>
For the last time, the fact that normative models are not descriptive of
psychological processes is *the* empirical finding of cognitive psychology
over the past 30 years - in a sense, it has undermined itself. I am pointing
out that this is one reason which the move to behaviourism was right in the
first place.
(snip)
>
> ................ my eyes are wide open, and I understand exactly what
> I am talking about. That is why I am not making damn fool statements
> about replacing human intelligence by an a priori normative (so
> called) standard, presumably dictated from the gods on high, and
> never established as valid by experimental data.
>
>
Your eyes are most definitely not *wide* open. From what you have written
it is clear to me that you do not yet understand the significance of the
work presented in:
the text of 'Fragments of Behaviour: The Extensional Stance' (available
(along with a summary text and some critical reviews by colleagues) at:
http://www.uni-hamburg.de/~kriminol/TS/tskr.htm
That in itself is no great failing as I claim to be explicating something
not widely understood even in my own profession.
--
David Longley
David Longley
Rickert..... go and read the literature....
--
David Longley